A Study in Blue
by TheShoelessOne
Summary: On 1st January, 1920, John Watson meets Sherlock Holmes. Jazz Age AU, eventual John/Sherlock.
1. One

**A Study in Blue**_  
Chapter One_

In 1919, John Watson is sent home. One of the thousands invalided by the gas and the bullets and the mud and the stink of what had once been France. There is a crater in the middle of Europe, and John Watson had been pulled out of it alive. A sad reminder of what John Watson had once been, but John Watson nonetheless. Some nights he wakes up, imagining the dull resounding thud of far-off mortars, the light of the flares stinging the black velvet sky with a spear of blinding white, the smell of mud and blood on his hands and working only by firelight to amputate another gangrenous limb. The echoes of comrades screaming alone in the dark die in his ears as he chokes them down with a sob.

This London is different than the one John Watson left behind, and this John Watson isn't the one that London remembers, either. He leans on a cane, relies on it heavily as he stalks through his grey days (moving through the streets he almost remembers, anything to keep moving, to keep from falling into the dangerous malaise that wants to swallow him and every soldier still breathing into its hot maw). Some of the boys wear their uniforms in public, all their medals, all their stripes. Not John Watson. He doesn't want to show off, doesn't want to disrespect the office, doesn't want anyone to know he'd been a medic and ask him how many lives he'd saved (because the only number he remembers is how many he hadn't).

John sits in front of the typewriter. Nearly new and already collecting dust. Can't bring himself to write about the war, and nothing at all to write in the present. He's a loop, a loop that refuses to open and let him out. He heard that Ambrose Black killed himself, yesterday. A little square in the paper. Nothing to look forward to, everything to look back upon, and Ambrose hadn't liked what he'd seen. John doesn't want to be Ambrose Black. He wants so badly for something to happen. _Something._

It's a Thursday, 1st January, 1920, when, taking his usual somber walk through Kensington Gardens, John hears his name.

"John Watson!" says the vaguely familiar voice, and John almost recognizes its owner when he forces his lame leg to let him turn and face it. "It's Mike Stamford," the jolly man says, and he immediately responds, with a laugh, to John's gaff. "I know, I've got fat."

It's only the men who didn't stand ankle-deep in freezing mud who have gotten fat. But John smiles anyway, even if it feels painful. "Yes, hello. How long's it been?"

"Near four years," Mike answers, and he gladly shakes John's free hand. "Look, mate, you free for lunch?"

John smiles again, but nowadays he hardly ever means it, and there's a painful line between his eyebrows. He's nearly _always_ free (even when the unemployment lines favor the wounded ex-officers, John is stubborn as hell and refuses to acknowledge disability with a sheet of paper).

"Sure," John says stiffly.

Mike treats him to lunch at the Criterion, and John feels even more out-of-place than usual (he hasn't worn anything nice, he'd just been out for a walk, and now people are _looking_ at him, looking at his leg and his limp and he can practically _feel_ their eyes curling with pity _look at the poor boy home from war_) but John just grits his teeth through it.

Mike asks about the war. He has the wide-eyed glassy look of a boy, and he spectacularly manages to ask all the wrong questions, but John can't bring himself to hate the man (partially because he's known Mike for years, partially because he'd feel like a right arse for taking Mike up on a meal then shouting at him). But Mike asks about France, what it was like driving in the ambulance line (some nights, John's teeth still rattle when they go over foxholes and bodies). John's false smile hurts worse than his leg, but Mike is a friend, and he hasn't had a friend since he'd come back over the Channel.

"You staying in London?" Mike asks after he's run out of questions to ask about long-dead boys and men.

John gives a tight laugh. "I can't afford it. Jobs scarce as they are." Something in his right hand shakes, and he balls his fists to stop it.

"Flatmate?" Mike suggests. "I'm sure there's plenty of blokes just back who need someone to go halves."

"Who'd want _me_ for a flatmate?" John asks, and there's something of pre-war John in there, in his crooked smile.

Mike mirrors it, and there's a slow dawning light in his eyes that speaks of plans and schemes. "Look, I'm having a bit of a to-do out at my place tonight. Upminster, not so far a go by train. I'd like if you'd come." He smiles like a boy. "You might get a flatshare out of it."

John wants to say _no, sorry, I'm fine enough without you uni boys and your champagne_. But he loves London, and he'd hate even more to pass up the opportunity to stay. So he nods and tells Mike he'll see him at eight.

* * *

The air is thick with smoke, even outside in the garden. Mike must've had good money, or a good family; the place looks stunning. The garden's strung with ball lights, and there's an open bar set up under one of the jutting eaves on the patio, and everyone's got their drinks and fags. The mellow scratches of a phonograph echo out across the yard, slow trumpet and piano.

They can't be much younger than John, the men and women standing in strategic knots in the garden, on the patio. There are a few like Mike, who must have got out of service somehow, and while it shouldn't seem insulting to John personally, he takes it to heart and tries not to speak to any of them (because he's not sure he won't shout). He hopes to God none of them are what Mike had in mind for a flatshare. They all went off to university while John was in a camp learning how to save lives.

(Worse are the men who all share the same far-off look in their eye, like they're still stuck in the mud in France and watching from across the Channel; these boys who drive their fast cars and sleep with fast women to keep their adrenaline up because without it they'll die.)

They try to pull John into intellectual discussion (in which they speak loudly at length about the bread lines and the strikes without really saying much of anything). John passes off his anger as ignorance, which they all think is quaint, and he smiles falsely around his experience. Put these boys in the middle of the unemployment line, they'd be a puddle of tears in minutes. Savoring the fact is the only thing keeping John sane in conversation.

Sherlock Holmes is the first man that John meets that doesn't want to talk about politics or unions or the sort of men he saw die on the battlefield. Sherlock Holmes, wreathed in his own cigarette smoke and looking at him (into him) with catlike gray eyes, says: "He won't notice."

John pauses, almost passes by because he's not even sure the lanky creature sitting elegantly on the barstool is speaking to him. "'Scuse me?" he clarifies.

"Mike," the pale man says easily. "He won't notice if you leave."

"Who says I want to leave?" John asks defensively (and he can tell even from seven feet away that the man's not drunk like most of the revelers are, and for some reason that's very interesting).

"You do." The man offers a feline smirk. He unfolds from the stool, and suddenly John feels dwarfed by the man who should by all means be some sort of statue adorning the garden, not a man walking about it. "Your limp is aggravated when you're under duress, which you clearly wouldn't be if you were enjoying yourself in any capacity. And yet you don't leave because you don't want to upset anyone—our gracious host, Michael Stamford, some sort of old acquaintance. I'd say fellow RAMC, but Mike's dodgy vision kept him out of the war and your stubbornness kept you _in_."

The man takes another long draw on his cigarette and exhales in thought, and John can't move.

"So, a fellow doctor but not a combat veteran like yourself. You've been serving since—" And he pauses, cocks his head. "—1916. Quite a long time to be away from old friends. I assume you met Mike today somehow in a casual situation, and he let slip an invitation to his get-together. But it's obvious you've drifted apart and really have little in common anymore, and so much is obvious even to him, since he hasn't come to speak with you since meeting you at the door. So, no. He won't notice if you leave."

It leaves John's jaw wagging, and the tall man simply grins through it, skin bunching pleasantly at his eyes.

"How...?" John begins uselessly, and all he latches onto is: "How'd you know I was RAMC?"

"Obvious." The man drops the blunt stub of a cigarette and grounds it out with his toe. "Would you like me to start with your military stature or the wound you sustained in action?" He smirks again, and, having completely avoided John's question, he holds his hand out between them. "Sherlock Holmes."

He should keep walking. Find Mike, excuse himself, it's not really his scene anyhow, but he doesn't. He takes the man's hand in kind and shakes firmly. "John Watson."

"Doctor?"

"Captain." John queries, "Mister?"

There's an odd quirk to the taller man's lips, suddenly terribly amused. "Sherlock."

They've been talking for barely five minutes before Mike approaches them, a tentative grin working onto his face. "Well, looks like you found each other," Mike says, and John's head turns at an odd, questioning angle.

"Sorry, what?"

"This is the bloke I told you about," Mike says as if he's some sort of magician waiting for applause.

John whips his head back around to the tall man beside him, who doesn't looks surprised at the development in the least.

"What, him?" John asks incredulously.

Sherlock gives a laugh. "Bad first impression?"

"No," John cuts in, and he leans heavily on his cane for support as he shifts. "No, that's not—I don't know anything about you."

"I play the violin," Sherlock says, and he buttons his long dark coat up to his neck. "Sometimes I don't talk for days on end. Others, I can't seem to stop. The place is central London, 221b Baker Street. Tomorrow at seven sharp, Captain." He gives a glancing wink before he addresses their host. "Mike, you'll have to excuse me, I've some blood to take before I head home."

And he's off, leaving behind only the impression of bouncing curls and the swish of a coat, giving the impression of moving quickly while the rest of the world goes slower to compensate. John watches him until he's gone through the gate, turns back to Mike with his eyebrows raised.

"He's always like that," Mike assures him.

* * *

AN: So begins my new BBCSherlock AU. I have no idea what possessed me to do this, other than the fact that I am in love with the time period and the boys. I've got my eyeballs glued to research for this, so hopefully it's realistic enough~ I'm not sure how long this'll be, or how long I'll be writing in the verse, or how closely it will adhere to the show or books, but there's only one way to find out. WRITE LIKE MAD! Thanks for sticking around, and for reading. Leave us some love and DON'T FORGET TO STAY AWESOME!


	2. Two

_Chapter Two_

John could have spent the day standing in line for the chance at a job, but he doesn't. He doesn't spend his afternoon trudging hopelessly through Kensington Gardens or the South Bank or any of his usual haunts (a cane-wielding ghost, unseen and unheard but for the angry stomp of the wooden cane). He finds himself in the British Museum Library, surrounded by the echoes of voices.

It's not quite seven when John trudges up to the door of 221b Baker Street, and he gazes at the innocuous door as if for direction. Perhaps it wasn't the best idea, to look at rooms with some bloke he'd only met last night (not even twenty-four hours ago, Jesus), but Mike knows John better than he thought. John really can't afford London on his petty army stipend, and it would break his heart to leave (more than anywhere, London's his home; where he went to school, where he grew up, where he wants to be for the rest of his life if he can manage it).

He needs Sherlock Holmes, if Sherlock will have a broken army vet.

John knocks carefully on the big door, and it's answered rather quickly. Not by a tall man with ghostly gray eyes, but a motherly-looking older woman with smile lines all over her kindly face. "Hello, dearie, what can I do for you?" she asks.

John panics for a quick moment; maybe he has the wrong address? But he'd been so sure—so he presses on doggedly. "I'm looking for Sherlock Holmes?"

"Oh!" And the woman's face brightens. "You must be the other lodger! So sorry, dear, come in! It's cold out, don't want you catching anything! Come in, Sherlock will be 'round any minute!" She bustles him inside (rather forcefully, he notices with a smirk) and takes his coat. "Mrs. Hudson, dear," she prompts.

"Ah. John Watson," he adds quickly, and his smile doesn't feel forced this time.

"Lovely to meet you, Mr. Watson," she says, clapping her hands together. "A friend of Sherlock's, well—" She gives a sad sort of laugh. "A friend is _most_ welcome."

"You know Sherlock well?" John asks, leaning heavily on his cane as he follows her into the foyer.

"He's a good boy," Mrs. Hudson says. "Bit of a shut-in sometimes, it's nice to see him get out, meet people. Would you like to see the place? Sherlock's already been through."

John hides a grimace. Already been through, he must be an eager chap. Maybe more desperate than John is. As he follows Mrs. Hudson up the stairs (landlady? housekeeper? she hasn't said), he wonders just what it is Sherlock Holmes does, who he is, what _he_ did during the war. Because if he's one of those uni boys who loopholed their way out, John is going to leave—he's going to storm out without apologizing and he might just throw something on his way.

(But John would've known. He would've seen that same smug look on his face at Mike's get-together. He can always tell a uni boy. He can always tell the ones who got out of the war and pretend that it didn't happen. Yes, there's something strange about Sherlock Holmes, something he can't place, but he's no uni boy.)

There's certainly a lot of junk sitting around the flat (opened boxes stacked on seemingly every available flat surface and even a huge steamer trunk full of maps open on the sofa; papers stacked and strewn haphazardly, books perched precariously in corners where they wouldn't fit on the shelves; immaculately clean scientific and medical instruments on the kitchen table and in the sink), but as John limps in and turns in circles to get a good look around, the trepidation flees his heart remarkably quick. It's spacious, especially for a London flat, and once he gets the junk shipped out, it'll look even more so.

"One bedroom on this floor, the other one's a floor up," Mrs. Hudson says, and she gives a sad look at the state of things. "That boy, always making such a mess."

John's eyebrows shoot up. "This is all his?" Already moved in?

He hadn't even heard any footsteps behind him, and when the voice speaks up from the doorway to the landing, he nearly gives a jump (nerves, reflexes). "Ah, well, I can tidy up—" When John turns, he finds Sherlock standing behind him, a nervousness in his once-immaculate stature. "John," he says in greeting.

"Sherlock," John says with a nod of his head.

"What do you think?" Sherlock asks, and John can't quite put his finger on what's changed since last night.

The lighting, yes, for one. When he's not lit by periodic lights strung up through a dark garden, he's less angular; less vaguely threatening and certainly more approachable. Not to say that he isn't as tall as he was, he's still impossibly tall. But less imposing, somehow. He's still an immaculate cut in a suit (putting John's patched blazer and braces to utter shame), straight tweed lines and sharp shoes. But his shoulders aren't the rigid line they had been, hair not lacquered to his head and instead hanging in loose curls around his ears, eyes tired but alert and he's leaning forward into the words he expects John to say.

"It's nice," John says for him. "Very nice."

"I'll go make us a cuppa," Mrs. Hudson says, and she goes off down the stairs to leave the two of them alone in the big cluttered sitting room.

There's a brief silence, almost uncomfortable, but not quite.

"I looked you up," John says, straightening his neck and back to seem taller. It really wasn't fair that Sherlock could impossibly read everything in him and John was none the wiser save for the young man's name (_young man_—he couldn't be over twenty-five to John's thirty; he's no genius, but he knows the way the world sits on a man's shoulders, and this one's barely a man at all). "I found your book. _The Science of Deduction_?"

There's a bright flash of interest in Sherlock's eyes. "And?"

John fixes him with an incredulous look. "You really think you can tell the difference between an RAF man and an American pilot just by their _left thumbs_?"

"Obvious," Sherlock says casually. "You've seen me do it, yourself. What is there left to doubt?"

"And that sort of thing happens a lot?" John asks, hobbling closer to get a better read on the man. "You, going up to strangers and reading their whole life to them?"

"Yes," Sherlock replies evenly.

"How'd you know?"

"Sorry?"

"That I was RAMC?"

Sherlock's eyes narrow almost imperceptibly, and there's a dangerous sort of electricity in them. "Your haircut," he says with a growing lopsided smirk.

"Please," John scoffs, but something curls his mouth up at the edges.

"Military standard, but you're not an army man," Sherlock continues. "You know how to fire a gun but you haven't fired one in combat, so much is obvious by the state of your hands. A fighting man has calluses, and someone in the war as long as you were would have a decently-sized one on his trigger finger, but not you. So, you were military but not on the front lines, with a surgeon's hands. RAMC. Simple."

John blinks in a bit of a daze. When it was spelled out like that, how could it _not_ be obvious? Oh, he needs to hear more. "And me and Mike. How'd you know that?"

Sherlock quirks an eyebrow. "Mike works at St Bart's, I've known him for five years; he lets me into the mortuary when he's feeling generous. But you've known him for longer than that, long enough to go away to war and still feel an attachment to him. I know that he's been at Bart's since his trainee days, so you must have been a hopeful trainee alongside him before war broke out and you were called up in 1916. Not a comrade-in-arms attachment, but good friends nonetheless—good enough to follow up on an invitation but not quite good enough to enjoy yourself. You resent him for not joining up, or attempting to, after you got the call. And you feel as though he resents you for not finishing your certification and instead going off to merry war with the boys."

John realizes that he's stopped breathing, and he lets it out with an astonished noise. "That was... impossible. Brilliant."

Sherlock looks at him like a child with a new, possibly dangerous toy. "Was it?"

"Absolutely, I've never heard anything like it, you're—That was amazing."

"That's not what people usually say," Sherlock mutters in a mixture of flattery and confusion.

"Well, what's that?"

The tall man grins a cheshire smile. "_Piss off_."

John grins. It nearly hurts, the muscles necessary having grown into disuse.

"How about these suicides, then, Sherlock?" Mrs. Hudson asks as she reappears in the sitting room with a tea tray. As John's heart settles from the palpitations her words set into them (Ambrose Black, little square in the newspaper; it could have been John Watson. Still could be), she frowns at the overflowing box of newsprint on the desk. "Honestly," she sighs.

Sherlock lifts it up and away for her. "Don't tell me you read those insufferable gossip rags, Mrs. Hudson," Sherlock chides. "Not a single decent story. Blatant sensationalism, it's utter rubbish."

"It looks right up your alley, dear," Mrs. Hudson continues, setting down the tray to pour the tea. "Get you out for a change."

Sherlock gives a heavy, full-chested sigh, and he turns his eyes back to John, who oddly hasn't questioned the conversation. "Well, what do you think, Captain?" Sherlock asks, his hands still cradling the box and eyes peering over newsprint.

"You've got everything you could possibly need to know about me, but I don't know a thing about you," John says. "Besides the violin thing, and honestly, I could care less about the violin thing." He straightens slightly. "Let me think it over."

Sherlock frowns like a child. "What?"

"I said I'll think it over," John reiterates.

He can hear the impatient huff from Sherlock's mouth the moment he hits the stairs, and he wonders what state the flat will be in tomorrow with this madman on a rampage. It makes John grin for the second time in ten minutes. The best record so far since his feet hit France.

* * *

His dreams are rough and horrible that night. Ink black sky lit up white and orange in the distance, followed by hard, quick blasts that roll across the ruined world like ripples. The stained glass over his head shakes and trembles with every concussion. The worst is the silence. The thudding, horrible pounding silence that thrums in his head louder than the mortars and the gunfire from the front, louder than the screams of the boys with their eyes burnt out from the gas. It's the silence in between that makes him shudder, the silence before everything explodes and everything beats around him like enclosing wings of birds, sets his nerves singing.

John jolts awake. In his tiny bed in his tiny flat on the wrong side of London, where the trains roll by in the night and the clatter causes the plates to rattle in the kitchenette. The noise comes a second time before John realizes that it isn't the report of machine guns but a knock at his door. As he makes himself decent, he checks the clock on the wall—some time in the morning just past obscene, not yet to dawn.

He doesn't undo the chain when he opens the door just wide enough to see through. There's a man with gray hair standing outside his door, a tired look in his weary eyes. Just some bloke, John thinks, but before he can close his door the man holds up his identification.

"Inspector Lestrade, Scotland Yard," he says in a tone that he must reserve for dull questioning. "Just a couple questions, if you don't mind."

John still doesn't unchain his lock. Bobbies in his building. He bristles only slightly. "Yes?"

"We need to know if you heard anything last night from number 314." He sounds as though he's repeated it enough for the whole floor. From the hallway, there's the soft hissing and thump of a record skipping. Brassy, soulful trumpet ad nauseam.

John shifts, and his leg gives a hard pang. "Jennie? Is she all right? Did something happen?"

Inspector Lestrade's tired eyes widen, and his eyebrows raise hopefully. "You know the girl?"

"A bit, yeah." (She comes in with different men all night, every other night, and no one says anything about it because everyone needs to make a living somehow.)

"Could you come with me, please?" Lestrade asks, and it's not forceful, but it sounds a bit desperate.

"If you could tell me what's going on?" John prompts.

"We need someone to identify her," Lestrade says with a heavy sigh.

There's a twist in John's stomach, some sick little lurch, and the pain crawls slowly up his throat. Dead, then. Jennie Wilson is dead. "Yes. Right, of course. Just give me a moment."

He takes his moment to compose himself, running his hands over his face, and to grab his cane leaning against the foot of his bed. He rejoins Lestrade in the hall and follows with a loud reliance on his cane. The sound of the trumpet (over and over) grows louder the closer they get to 314, and it pours out into the hallway when Lestrade opens the door for him.

The record skips and skips, the same trumpet lick again and again and again and—And suddenly a long-fingered hand appears, lifts the needle and gently replaces it on the spinning record. The soft pangs of the trumpet begin again in honest, crying like a woman in solitude and backed by the tiny, echoing voice of the piano. Sherlock Holmes retrieves his hand, shuts his eyes and lets his head sag backward and his eyes slip shut as he listens, now uninterrupted, and a smile creeps over his face as he brings his cigarette to his lips.

It takes John a moment to work his mouth and interrupt the scene. "Sherlock?"

The man at the record player turns his head, and there's a movement of surprise in his eyes. "John."

"You know each other?" Lestrade asks, bewildered.

Sherlock smirks. "Yes. He's my flatmate."

The inspector gives a look over his shoulder to John's one-man flat, then turns back to Sherlock. "But you're over on—"

"Will be," Sherlock says, as if it's a superfluous detail. "Care to join us, John?"

* * *

AN: I apologize for no Donovan, but she is proving VERY hard to fit in. Damn you 1920s and making it nearly impossible to fit women characters in. Unrelated note, I love describing jazz. I don't know, I think I have a bit of a jazzfetish. You will probably be seeing a lot more of it, so sorry in advance! Also, sorry for cutting off right at the interesting bit! Not much to say here this time, just that THANK YOU SO MUCH for the overwhelming support so far, I really appreciate it! Makes me want to write even more ARGH! Okay well, I hope you enjoy, leave us some love, and above all else STAY AWESOME!


	3. Three

_Chapter Three_

John takes a cautious step into 314, into the middle of a haze of smoke and jazz, under the eyes of four uniformed bobbies and one other plainclothes detective. John ignores them, there are far more interesting things to look at.

One of them is a dead body.

Jennie Wilson had always been a pretty girl (at least in the four months John had known her), in a sad sort of way. She tried to be the sort of girl you'd see in the magazines, hair short and bobbed like an American, dress up above her knees, eyes dark and wide. She couldn't cover herself in jewels, no one in this part of London could afford that sort of statement. But she'd been trying, the poor girl. Poor sad girl who got her money waiting at the corner. She'd drown it out with the loud stabs of trumpets from the gramophone. She'd always been courteous.

So John frowns when he sees her propped up against the seat by her window, legs splayed awkwardly as if she'd sunk there, an arm over the seat, head lolled to her shoulder and pale. Dead, and for some time, by the look of her.

The other is Sherlock Holmes.

He's looking expectantly at John, as if he knows that John is going to open his mouth and say something ignorant, or something stupid. But it's amusement sitting in bright gray eyes as they tick over John's face. Like a man reading a book, wholly absorbed and ignorant of the world moving around him. It should be unnerving. But it's not, and John hasn't the slightest idea why.

"You're not with Scotland Yard," John says, and Sherlock's eyes practically sparkle with mirth.

"No, I'm not," he answers vaguely.

"So," John continues, speaking slowly as he thinks it through. "You're a private detective? No," he adds quickly, especially at the squint coming into Sherlock's face. "You're not a private detective, either. So what are you?"

"Consulting detective," Sherlock says proudly. "The only one. I invented the job."

"Look, Sherlock," Lestrade cuts in, "who is this bloke? Flatmate, yeah, but I just can't let him walk into a crime scene—"

"He's an army doctor," Sherlock interrupts the interruption, taking his eyes from John's momentarily. "And your coroner won't arrive for another hour at best, he's having an affair with a club singer and he's far on the other side of London for it—I'd say she's too good for him if she weren't an impossible nuisance."

Lestrade's face pinches in disdain when he turns back to John with a sigh that has years of trouble behind it. "Yeah all right, may as bloody well make yourself at home, Doctor."

"Er—" John begins to correct him, but Sherlock is at his side before he can.

"You're here because you knew her," Sherlock says, and the cigarette is at his side almost as a courtesy at this proximity. He gives John a look up and down, then takes a step back. "Not one of her customers, though."

John doesn't know how to blush anymore, or else he might have. "Just my neighbor," John clarifies. "I'll help, if I can. She... She was a nice girl."

A smirk jumps to Sherlock's lips. "Good man. Cause of death?" he asks, whirling back away to the body. There's a murmuring from the bobbies, but John limps forward, following Sherlock. They kneel down on either side of Jennie's body, and John immediately begins his inspection.

(Yes, he didn't get all the way through his training at Bart's before war swept him up, but he knows more than sutures and amputation, and there's a bright spot of pride in his chest that Sherlock can see that; that Sherlock sees more than the medic in the mud jabbing morphine into men who may as well be corpses.)

"No marks on her," John says briefly. "No blood. Looks like she passed out. Drugs maybe, she doesn't smell like alcohol. Choked on her own—" He glances up to see Sherlock staring at him, his fingers steepled and pressed to his lips in deep thought, peering John down. "What?"

"Even _you_ read the newspaper," Sherlock says almost condescendingly. "Like dear Mrs. Hudson."

It sparks a memory, and John snaps to attention. "Suicides?" No, he hasn't been keeping up with the stories in the paper, but he's heard enough. A string of suicides city-wide, and the news drumming up another fog of fear to throw over the good ladies and kids at home.

Sherlock's smile reminds John of a cat. A feral cat. "This will be the fourth."

"Anything you've got, Sherlock," Lestrade says impatiently from the door. The second detective is glaring at the record player, still winding its gorgeous brass wailing around the room.

"You're first," Sherlock says under his breath, and there's another bare wink before he's on his feet and turned to the Yarders, and John follows with his eyes. Sherlock motions for John to join him with one hand, and the other moves the ashing cigarette to his lips. John rises, albeit stiffly and slowly, but he does.

"Jennie Wilson," John says at the prompt. "Been living down the hall from her for four months, since I got back. She had lots of blokes back here, but she didn't die from any sort of force or wound."

"What John means is Jennie Wilson sold her body," Sherlock says crisply. "Based on the bedclothes, there hadn't been a man in there for a good seven hours, long before she collapsed. More importantly, she has no family to report her to. No photos in the room anywhere, no one to reminisce about. Either she was estranged or orphaned, but regardless we save money on calling someone to claim her body."

John shoots Sherlock a concerned glance, but the man is on a roll (looking as cool and natural in his element as a conductor before his orchestra, all of them holding their breath as he holds his baton aloft).

"The signs are the same as with the other three apparent suicides you've brought to my attention," Sherlock continues, and he takes an effortless draw on his cigarette and speaks with a cloud of dragonsmoke from his mouth. "All apart from the location. The others were all found in places they had no right being, Ms. Wilson is in her own apartment. Phonograph on, bed ready for another suitor, by all means it looks as though it doesn't fit into the pattern."

"Well, does it?" Lestrade asks.

"Of course, don't be an idiot," Sherlock snaps lightly, as if at a child or a dog nipping at his ankles, and John stifles a laugh. He gathers himself and butts in.

"Sorry, are you saying these are _serial suicides_? How does that even happen?" John asks.

"The type of poison used is the same in each case," Sherlock says, even when Lestrade has opened his mouth to answer. "Same method: the victims take the pills themselves and, up until now, they've been found in odd locations not a part of their normal routine. I need to have a look through her handbag, have you seen it?" He gives a whirl to glance about the room.

"Her handbag? Why?" John asks as the bobbies begin a halfhearted search.

"There's no handbag," Lestrade cuts in, moving in and clearly impatient.

Sherlock peers angrily at him, as if it's his fault. "Of course there's a handbag. Look at her, she spends all her money emulating American fashion, she won't be walking about without something equally as gaudy and—"

He pauses. There are a million words hiding in that pause, John can practically see them in Sherlock's widening eyes. "Oh," he murmurs barely above a whisper. And then the second exclamation nearly keens out of him. "_Oh!"_ He looks breathless and hopelessly giddy for all of two seconds before he moves past them for the doorway.

"Sherlock?" Lestrade calls after him, nearly attempting to restrain him (John can't imagine trying to restrain that look in his eyes, like trying to bottle a storm). "What? What is it?" (And for a moment John can see beyond the title to a man who wants to do his job and wants to serve his city, and all he has to work with is a man whose mind slips through his fingers like grasping at sand.)

"Serial killers, they're always hard," Sherlock murmurs to himself gleefully. "Have to wait for them to make a mistake."

"We can't just _wait_," Lestrade pleads, and suddenly the three of them are moving out into the hall.

"We don't have to," Sherlock hisses venomously. "How _can _you be so dull? Really _look_ at her!"

"Hold on," John cuts in. "You said suicides, but now you're talking about serial killers? You can't have both in one."

"They take the poison themselves," Sherlock says slowly but purposefully, as if to two children peering stupidly up at him. "Yes, it's obvious, but _she doesn't have her handbag_. It's too important and too expensive to accidentally leave with a client, and John, you yourself said that she brings her men back here, and so where is it? Our killer's made his mistake!"

"Yeah, and what's that?" Lestrade begs.

"Blue!" Sherlock says in a last forceful hurrah before he's gone down the stairs out the back of the building.

The hall feels all the emptier for it.

Lestrade gives a heavy growl of a sigh and turns lazily to John, who is still staring into the space left behind by Sherlock Holmes. "All right, thanks for your help, Doctor... er..."

"Not a doctor," John corrects him without looking over, and familiar frown lines find his face. "Watson."

"Right, then, Mister Watson," Lestrade mutters, and he sounds just as lost as John inexplicably feels. "Thanks for your help, we're going to have to ask you to head back into your flat. Nothing more you can do here."

"Of course," John says, and there's a dull pain in his leg that he doesn't remember bothering him crouching down beside the sad corpse in 314. "Right, is he coming back?" John asks almost tightly.

"Who knows," Lestrade shrugs (and his age is showing in his face more now than ever). "He always does this," the next comes out bitterly. "Running off without telling you bloody _anything_. You're thinking of flatsharing with him? Don't."

John opens his mouth to protest, but Lestrade has moved on, back into Jennie Wilson's flat, shutting the door behind him. John stands for a moment in the empty hallway, and then his leg reminds him that he should be sleeping. Or at least sitting. He gives a pained hiss and moves back for his own sad, empty flat.

Someone takes the needle off the phonograph in Jennie's flat, and the building goes eerily silent.

* * *

John tries to sleep. Of course it's no use, but he may as well try. It's not the cold silence between mortar drops that keeps him from closing his eyes this time, as it usually is (cold frosting over the trenches and freezing the blood into the ice, freezing silence that bites into his stagnant bones). It's the excitement that's still thrumming in him like the quiet bass backing the trumpet. It won't let him.

It's still some time before sunrise while John tosses in bed (the beat of the music from the record, hiss of air as Sherlock replaces the needle, kneeling together beside the dead woman and the detective peeling back the folds of her life with his eyes, the sharp thrill in his stomach at the prospect of mystery and intrigue), hardly an hour after all the sounds from Jennie's flat have ceased and the police gone home, when John hears something at his window.

He sits up in the gray light and squints blearily at the half-darkness outside. There's a figure crouched on the fire escape outside, the red burning end of a lit cigarette lighting the lower half of an angular face. At John's movement, the figure looks up from its work on John's window, and a gloved hand gives a nonchalant wave, then knuckles rap quietly on the glass for entry.

John allows a lopsided grin, and he hobbles over to the window, unlocking it and throwing it open to reveal Sherlock Holmes.

"Sorry for running off," he says offhandedly, shoving his feet in first and letting them dangle above the floor. "The existence of others escapes me when I'm in the moment. Here, I've found her handbag." Sherlock dumps the bright blue handbag into John's hands and flicks his cigarette into the cold morning air before climbing fully in to John's flat.

"What...?" John asks uselessly, and he nearly drops the bag in shock.

"Keep up, John. Have Lestrade and his lackeys gone?" Sherlock stands in the center of John's immensely tiny flat and turns, taking it all in with his hands clasped behind his back. John feels unreasonably embarrassed, and white knuckles clutch at the blue handbag.

"Er, yes. About an hour back."

"Didn't stick around long, then," Sherlock scoffs. "Useless. Did they treat you well?" The tone indicates that Sherlock expects (knows) that they did not.

"Handbag," John says instead, bringing the attention of the conversation back to what's important. He sits with a difficult grunt back on the edge of his bed. "Where'd you find it and how'd you know?"

Sherlock gives a light sniff but acquiesces. He hops up into the nearest chair (a bare little wooden thing) and he pulls his knees up to his chest, looking either as though he's about to spring up or that he's coiled into himself in excitement.

"Jennie Wilson was a prostitute," Sherlock says plainly.

"It's not only prostitutes that carry handbags," John says, hopefully leading the conversation (since when does John have conversations about dead women's handbags with men who crawl up his fire escape?).

"No, but _think_ about it, John. She wouldn't have misplaced her handbag because it was expensive and American. Matches her outfit, the lifestyle. Wouldn't have forgotten it anywhere because, as you say, this is where the action takes place. Unless..." He leads John's line of thought, or attempts to. When John simply stares back, nonplussed, Sherlock sighs and continues. "Unless it were left in an automobile that picked her up."

"Well, that doesn't mean anything," John says, slightly disappointed.

"It means _everything,_" Sherlock counters. "This sort of handbag, it's something gaudy and obvious, not something you misplace or something that will go unseen. Especially if a man carries it. It's bright blue, catches the eye, brings unnecessary attention. Exactly what a killer doesn't want. So he'd want to get rid of it as soon as possible, once he'd discovered that he still had it in his car."

"Wait," John cuts in, "you figured that out because you knew the handbag would be bright blue?"

"It took me less than an hour to find the right skip. I checked every back street wide enough for a car within five minutes' driving time from your building, maximum time it would have taken him to realize his mistake." Sherlock smirks. "So. We know that he has a vehicle, and we know that he had her in it. And yet something doesn't fit."

John is catching on, slowly but surely. "Location," he says, and Sherlock's face brightens in appreciation. "You said they all died in someplace they shouldn't have been, all but Jennie. She died at home."

"Exactly," Sherlock all but exclaims. "Something changed his mode of operations, something about her specifically."

"She was a prostitute," John blurts, the conversation coming full circle.

"And he didn't know it," Sherlock finishes with a proud look sitting up in his eyes. "Now tell me, who _accidentally_ picks up a prostitute?"

John's jaw waggles slightly (how had Sherlock got him to do that?), and it turns into a wide-open grin. "Amazing."

"Do you know you say that out loud?" Sherlock asks, and if John didn't know better, he'd say the unflappable man looked absolutely flapped.

"Sorry," John says quickly.

"It's fine," Sherlock amends after the briefest pause.

"So," John leads back into the conversation, "are you going to take this up with that bloke Lestrade?"

Sherlock gives a derisive noise and John nearly laughs. "The police are useless," Sherlock mutters. "More concerned with the money coming into their wallet than with anything truly _interesting_. As usual, I'll take care of this for them and let them clean up when I've had my fun. What?" he asks suddenly at the smirk spreading over John's face.

"It's a serial killer, you shouldn't be having _fun_."

"Why not? Aren't you?" And the knowing look Sherlock fixes him with says everything John won't. "Are you going to move in with me, or aren't you?" he adds. With the piercing look in those eyes, it's becoming more and more clear that Sherlock Holmes isn't used to waiting for anything. Or anyone.

"Lestrade said I shouldn't," John says, but he's made up his mind (probably had the moment he let the man climb through his window).

"Did he give any reason why you shouldn't?" Sherlock asks, and when he unfolds from the chair, he looks almost inhumanly large in John's little flat. Like a lanky cat still trying to figure out how human limbs work.

"No," John answers.

And they both smile at the same time.

Sherlock looks away first, to the window, where the light of day is beginning to filter in through the heavy cloud cover of what looks to be another frighteningly cold January day. "I need you to do something for me," Sherlock says. "Get a pen."

He moves to the window and peers out as John shuffles awkwardly around the flat, looking for something to write on and with. Once he has, Sherlock throws the window open, and the chill air spills in. John shudders, and there's a jolt in his system that feels almost thrilling (the splash of cold mud under his boots as he throws another injured man in the ambulance, the excited beating of his heart, the rush).

"Take this down, exactly," Sherlock says to the open window. "Lost: blue Whiting Davis handbag, since Friday evening, property Ms Jennie Wilson. Return to 22 Northumberland St."

"We have the bag, Sherlock," John says, writing it down regardless.

"What? No, don't be dull, John," Sherlock says as he strides over. "Did you get all of that?" John nods. "Good, I need you to get that published in whatever paper you can. Quickly."

John looks up. "And what'll you be doing, then?"

"Doesn't matter. The quicker, the better, John," Sherlock says, and he's back out the window. He doesn't go far, sitting far out on the fire escape and lighting up another cigarette to puff on it in silence. Grabbing his coat and his cane, without giving it so much as a second thought, John limps out of the flat.

Two minutes later, the advert still clutched in his off hand, a shining black car pulls up alongside him, and a pretty woman in warm furs steps out to greet him.

"If you'd be so kind as to get in the car, Captain," the woman says almost dully, "my employer would like a word."

* * *

AN: I don't have much to say except that it took me an especially long time to figure out some of the plot points in this chapter. It's harder than expected to make a recognizable mystery but make it different enough to fit in with the time period. I FEEL YOUR PAIN, MOFFAT. Exciting things are going down next chapter, too, so I hope y'all stick around! Thanks so so much for your encouragement and love so far, and I hope I don't disappoint! So leave us some love and don't forget the STAYING AWESOME!


	4. Four

_Chapter Four_

John nearly keeps walking. That's when the car stops and two large men emerge from the driver and passenger doors. And John freezes (combat reflexes, run or fight or surrender). Stops moving, eyes darting from one chunk of man to the other. Finally stop on the woman (pretty, _very_ pretty, but cold and closed-off, a superficial expression on her lovely face). She doesn't smile, simply pulls the fur collar closer around her neck, as though the chill January air is an effrontery to her.

"In the car, please," she says blankly, nodding to the still-open door.

And it's London for you, after-the-war-London, that no one says anything as they pass by, just go on with their heads ducked down and ignoring. They've got so good at ignoring.

So John holds his head high, straightens his back, and limps to the open door of his own volition. The man-bricks take their positions in the front seats again, not having spoken a word, and the woman slides in easily beside John. The doors snap shut, the engine huffs, and they're off.

"All right," John initiates conversation roughly, his voice hard. "Who are you, then?"

The woman doesn't answer. She's pulling a silk handkerchief from her handbag (not blue, not gaudy and American). "Close your eyes," she instructs.

"Oh, come on," John scoffs (Sherlock's advert is still clutched in one of his hands, and he lets up on the scrap of paper to be sure he doesn't inadvertently destroy it).

"I will force you, if I have to," the woman says easily, as if bending John in half with one hand won't be a strain on her in the slightest.

John's entire face puckers up in a frown, but he obliges at last. The woman ties the handkerchief securely over his eyes, and even if he'd had his eyes open, the world would be an utter mystery. He gives an unkind rumble of a sigh.

"And whatever he's had you write down," the woman speaks again (she has a lovely voice, if only it weren't part of the package with those cold, unfriendly eyes). "Give it here."

"I don't think so." John tries for steady.

"I've been told to make sure that it's published," she says, and John's head turns surprisedly to the sound of her voice. "Hand it over, Captain," she says, and there's a sting in the epithet. John frowns even deeper and he holds out the paper with Sherlock's instructions, which quickly leaves his fingers.

"I don't even get a name?" John snaps. And when the car comes to a light stop, he considers opening his door and bolting.

"I have a pistol," the woman remarks lightly. "I've been told not to use it, but the threat should be enough to keep you in your seat." She sounds almost _bored_. One of the men in the front of the car exits, and he doesn't return. John can only assume that she's handed the paper to him, because they're soon moving again without him.

"Fine," John huffs a sigh. "Your employer, then? Can I know who that is?"

"You'll see soon enough," the woman says, and he can feel her lean back in the seat. "Perhaps it's better if we don't talk, John."

The sound of his first name stings more than his rank, from her lips. John all but scowls, and, red-faced, falls into heated silence.

They only take the blindfold off him once he's been pulled forcibly from the automobile (to the chagrin of his leg, which shouts in pain) and moved into standing position—he can hear the floor under his shoes, it's concrete; the smell of the place is sterile, punctuated by the sweet hint of tea. The handkerchief comes off, and John blinks at the humming overhead lights.

There's a man. A tallish man, dark suit, flashy red tie. Long nose good for looking down, the same sort of high-class half-grimace on his face that his assistant in the furs is wearing. He's leaning casually on an umbrella. It hasn't rained for three days.

The grimace changes to a snakelike false smile. "Good morning, John," the man says, all upper-crust and condescendingly chipper. He waves a hand to the small table nearby, where two empty seats and a teapot sit waiting. "You haven't slept well, take a seat. The tea is Fortnum's, I hope you don't mind."

John gives it a cursory glance, then settles himself firmly standing, leaning to take stress off the yowling pain up and down his leg. "No thanks." It comes out clipped, the way John wants it.

"There's no rush," the taller man says, and it rolls out of his mouth, lazy with decadence. "My man's seen to it that Sherlock's little dalliance will be published. Evening edition, just in time, I should say." He reaches for his pocket watch, casually checks the time he's not really interested in, and gestures again at the tea. "Have a seat."

"Why am I here?" John asks, getting straight to the point, never mind that he was dragged here against his will and blindfolded.

The man cocks his head only slightly, and nothing on his face changes to tell John anything. "A friendly chat."

He stops himself just short of growling _My arse_, and starts again. "Yeah? About what?"

"Sherlock Holmes," the man says, as if surprised that John hasn't figured it out. He does take a seat, and he pours himself a steaming cuppa. It's cold in here, John realizes, whatever storage building along the Thames this is. "Very interesting, how you've decided to take up living with him only a day after meeting him."

(John tries to rationalize it in his head—really, it's been a day and soon to be another half—and he frowns deeply when he realizes his thought process is splayed all over his face for the tall man with the brolly to see.)

"You know Sherlock." Not a question.

"Intrinsically." Not necessarily an answer.

"His friend?"

There's a cruel quirk of lips. "You've met him. How many friends do you think he has?"

"Not a friend, then what?" He would be bored if not for the secrecy, the tension, the mystery.

"An enemy. Or a rival. However you see it, he sees me as an obstacle, and I find him ever increasingly one of mine."

The man takes a short drink from his teacup, and John purses his lips impatiently.

"So that's not any of my business," John says.

"Are you going to take the room he's offered you?" the man asks suddenly, nearly cutting into John's statement. He pulls out a small diary to peer at something written there. "At 221b Baker Street?"

"And that's none of _yours_." John's voice all but stamps testily. (Of course he's going to take the room; no sharp-suited man with his black cars and his tea and his insufferable smugness is going to stop him now, not now that someone's told him not to.)

"He's not an easy man to suffer in close quarters. I would tell you to look elsewhere, but you're clearly a determined man," the man continues as if uninterrupted. "I can perhaps make things a little easier for you."

"Yeah? And how's that?"

"You haven't a job. Jobs are hard to come by, even for... disabled veterans," he adds with a noticeable change in tone. Coercion. John bristles instinctually. "However, I know a few employers who are always eager to receive a call from me."

"And I'd have to do what?" No one does anything for free, not in 1920, not for someone like John.

"Information." The man stands again, and there's casual in his limbs and shoulders, but a stark seriousness has crept into his face. "Nothing incriminating, on your part. Just tell me what he's up to. How he's doing."

"About Sherlock? Why?"

"I worry about him." This time there's something different in the man's voice. Insistence, a voice used to giving commands and for them to be followed. "_Constantly_."

For a moment, John doesn't even remember his leg and the throbbing pain that hasn't stopped since France, since the bullet, since he left for home.

"No." It's heavy coming out of John's lungs, heavy and angry.

"No? I haven't even told you what the job would be." Amusement sits in his tone, ready to spring into anger if it must.

"Not interested," John adds with finality.

"You haven't asked him what he did for the war effort," the man says with a disconcerting smile spreading over his face.

"How do you know?" John asks, unable to stop. How could anyone know that?

"Because you're still defending him." He leans back slightly, eyes cooly narrowed and observant. "Because there's still a war in you, Captain Watson. You didn't leave it in France, and now it's looking for a way out."

John's mouth falls open, and the anger that's been building in him is threatening to burst. It must show, it has to be showing, John wants it to be seen. And the tall man only smiles.

"Your leg bothering you, John?" the man asks superciliously.

John doesn't answer (because as soon as he's said it, the old pain flares up, and no matter how hard he tries to hide it, the man would know). John simply clamps his jaw shut tightly, shifts again so that the weight doesn't sit on his bad leg.

"I don't know who you are, and I frankly don't care," John says through his teeth (bitterness and pain). "But I don't take so well to bribes. And yeah, I met Sherlock yesterday, and I'm not going to know everything about the bloke in twenty-four hours, but he damn well didn't stick me in the back of a car and blindfold me. Not quite endearing yourself, there." John takes a bold step forward, and the tall man flinches (not in his body, but in his eyes). "So if you're not going to make any more threats, I'd say we're done here."

(Thrilling like the sound of bullets through thick air, staring that tall man down; maybe there _is_ a bit of war left in John Watson.)

The man allows a smirk dripping with vitriol to slide across his face. "My assistant will see you home, John. Do think it over, won't you?"

John doesn't snap back that he certainly won't, along with several very un-Christian obscenities, and he feels the pressure in his molars at the strength it takes to keep that mouth shut. He winces when he turns away, focused on getting back to the car, getting out, getting back to Sherlock.

"Oh, and Captain," the man's voice calls languidly after him. "Welcome back."

He doesn't even dignify the man with an acknowledgment of his existence. Limps up to and past the pretty assistant in the furs and growls out his address, thumping into the back seat with a hiss. They go through the nonsense with the blindfold again, and he doesn't put up a fight. All of him itching to be back in his flat (his tiny flat, the flat that won't be his much longer, the flat where he left Sherlock Holmes smoking on his fire escape).

But Sherlock Holmes isn't there when John shoves the key in his lock and throws the door open. He checks the fire escape, his kitchenette, his closet. There's nowhere for a man of Sherlock's height to keep himself, and all signs of him (aside from the smoke sticking in his carpet) have gone, nothing to tell that there had ever been a second man in the flat.

For just a moment, John's _disappointed_. He's not sure what he'd been expecting (banishing all thought of a proud smile flashing under icy eyes awaiting him), he couldn't expect Sherlock to just wait for him. Granted, Sherlock _was_ the one who had sent him out, and he's taken the handbag with him, and everything is exactly as John had left it, aside from—

There's a note on his desk, the desk cluttered with paper that his mother had given him for the typewriter but he'd never used, ink ribbons she expected him to tear right through still untouched in the second drawer. It must be Sherlock's handwriting, and John takes a moment to chuckle at the man's laughably-bad penmanship.

_Angelo's, across from 22 Northumberland St. 8 sharp. Come if convenient._

_SH_

John lifts the note to inspect it further, only to find a second note under it (both the short missives taking up the entire white page).

_If inconvenient, come anyway. Could be dangerous._

_SH_

John shakes his head disbelievingly. Reaching into his top drawer, John's fingers close on the familiar grip of his pistol. 

* * *

Angelo's is a little club in Soho, one John's never been to or heard of, but the band is loud enough to hear from the street outside (not uncommon at this hour, jazz blasting out the windows and doors, all of them thrown open to combat the heat off all the dancing bodies). It's a little before eight, and John's haunted by the smell of food wafting out Angelo's door as he steps in; he's hardly eaten all day, as if the thrill of it has chased any idea of a meal from his stomach.

He hasn't dressed up (he hardly owns anything nicer than his blazer, not counting the ceremonial uniform, and he'll be damned if he lets people glaze over with that look of pity he gets with that uniform), and he's infinitely glad to see it's warm and casual on the inside. It's close, but intimate. Safe. Not bright and harsh like the Criterion. It's mellow, soft light, neutral colors. And blues.

They've got a little upright piano (banged on so hard it's half out of tune, and everyone else drops a half step to compensate), loud brass, thumping upright bass (the backing heartbeat, constant, constant). A pretty black woman is singing her soul out in front of them (the only faces that aren't white in the club are those up on the stage, that's how it always is).

Before John can get lost in the sound, there's someone at his elbow in a white suit, staring insistently at him. John turns with a start, feels suddenly out of place, and why is he even here?

"Name?" the man asks—he's not brusque, he's almost loose, the opposite of his suit and shining shoes. John glimpses the tables surrounding the dance floor, and they're packed, lit with candles, awaiting a nice, quiet conversation.

"Ah, I—" John tries to gather himself. The woman's song comes to an end, and the whirling dancers stop their endless movement to clap and whoop loudly. "I'm looking for Sherlock Holmes."

The man brightens instantly, surprisingly, and he all but claps John on the shoulder. "You must be Watson, then! Bit shorter than I thought you'd be, but I'm Angelo." He holds out a hefty hand for John to shake, which he does, a bit bewilderedly.

From the direction of the stage, nearly all sound has ceased. Only the piano playing notes out of tune for pizzicato strings as they're tugged into resonance. The skip of a bow over the strings is a bit like liquid silver, and John glances up.

It's Sherlock_._

He doesn't look out of place amongst the jazz boys at the piano and the bass, like he should. He should look all elbows, pale and skinny in the hot lights that are making everyone sweat. Oh, but he doesn't. In shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. Violin tucked between his chin and shoulder, arms lax as he speaks quietly to the pianist, bow flicking through the thick air, and then he raises it again. Gets a pure ring out of it that puts a shock through John. He looks like he belongs up there, loose and smirking around a cigarette that he finally takes out and snubs into the ashtray on the upright.

Then the piano starts. Sherlock closes his eyes, shoulders go soft, and suddenly there's music coming out of him. Swinging into his notes, scratching the bow and just—

John feels movement at his elbow again, and suddenly he realizes that he's been staring. Staring hard at Sherlock Holmes pouring jazz from his violin as Angelo's patrons clutch to one another and dance. There's heat in his ears, and it has to be from the lights. Angelo is smiling.

"He's got a table ready for you," Angelo says. "Always the one by the window, for Sherlock. He says you can eat while you wait."

"I—thanks," John says as he takes the proffered menu. He asks (eyes trying not to linger too long on the figure on stage all limbs and heady jazz), "You know Sherlock well, then?"

"Kept me out of lock-up, he did," Angelo says sprightly. Right. Reformed criminal with a jazz club. Only about as strange as army vets getting kidnapped and bribed in broad daylight. "Anything on the menu for you, Mister Watson, it's on the house."

John nods his thanks, but Angelo is already moving off.

Leaving John sitting at a table for two by the window and staring up at Sherlock and his violin.

(It's almost like they're the same creature, the man and his instrument, swaying with the music at every chord change, at every trill. The way he grins when he hits a certain note. He still hasn't opened his eyes.)

And when the song is over (a long ten minutes of rosin clouds and broken bow hair), when the loud clapping supersedes the maudlin violin, Sherlock tilts his head back, takes a long breath and lets his violin fall to his side with his weary arm. Looks up. Sees John at the table with his untouched food going cold in front of him with dark blue eyes locked on the stage.

Sherlock smirks. Winks. Leaves the stage in a flourish and is gone.

John's on his feet and headed backstage without a second thought. Angelo doesn't stop him.

The singer from before is back there, and her voice doesn't sound half as lovely when she's shouting instead of singing. John can hear her before he can see her.

"You ate into half my show time," she growls. "Again."

Another familiar voice joins in, low and deep and bored. "Your voice is off tonight, Sally. Put something in your throat that didn't belong there, earlier this evening?"

"_Bastard!"_ the woman's voice seethes. Something topples to the ground, and that's how John finds them. Halfway through a row. She freshened up but on her way to livid, hands fisted like she wants to punch him (maybe she will). And Sherlock calm as you please, leaning back in a chair as he packs his violin carefully away (long fingers that take care).

"Am I interrupting something?" John asks, and for a moment the words of the mysterious man echo back in his head (_He's not an easy man to suffer in close quarters_), and part of him wonders if this is Sherlock at his most usual—he won't say _normal_, not someone with a brain like that.

Sherlock's head snaps up, and he's on his feet remarkably fast. Yet his voice is cool as always. "John." He turns his head to the singer almost thoughtlessly. "John, this is Sally Donovan."

"I heard you earlier," John remarks (because, honestly, fighting with a _lady_). "It was lovely."

Sherlock frowns lightly. "Sally, this is my flatmate, John Watson."

Her face falls into a look of incredulity. "You're flatsharing with _him_?" Sally asks with an unbelieving look between the two. "Look, get out while you still can. I have a show to put on, thanks." And she steps past John and to the stage.

John turns back to Sherlock, eyebrows raised. "That was rude, you know. About her and... and—"

Sherlock interrupts: "We have a merry war of our own," waving it off. He takes a step closer, almost into John's space. "You're here."

"_You_ asked me here," John reminds him.

"What took you so long?" Sherlock asks, looking down at him. But it's not the haughty condescending look he remembers from the clandestine storehouse meeting. "I was in your stuffy little flat for hours."

"Got delayed," John admits. "Your advert went in, though."

"Good," Sherlock says with a catlike grin, which all but falls away an instant later. "Delayed? By what?"

"Your _enemy_," John scoffs, replaying the bizarre meeting.

"Hmph," Sherlock remarks, rolling his eyes. "Which one?"

"You've got more than one man with a black car and a gorgeous assistant to kidnap potential flatmates?" But John is smirking, a dangerous half-smirk. Running the trenches near Amiens smirk. "Isn't that the sort of thing you should advertise up front?"

Understanding blooms in Sherlock's eyes. "He offered you a job in exchange for spying on me, didn't he?"

John's eyebrows press down in confusion. "Yeah?"

Then, Sherlock laughs. Almost like the bark of a dog, sudden and bright. "How'd you like my dear big brother?"

"Your—" John gapes, stupefied. "Your _what?"_

"Come on," Sherlock says with a grin, throwing his suit jacket on over his shirtsleeves. "Your dinner's getting cold. You haven't eaten."

"How do you even...?" But John is following him, follows the long-legged stride back into the club like he belongs there, in step behind Sherlock.

He doesn't notice the cane still hooked to the back of his chair when they get to their table, either.

* * *

AN: I... apologize for all the jazzporn. It may be getting out of hand. But I can't help it. Jazz is sexy. I'm sorry if you abhor my jazzfetish (or if I've inadvertently given you one). I'm also trying to make things new and interesting while still following the Study in Pink plot, not sure how well I'm doing, but I am having fun doing it! Thanks for reading so far, leave us some love, and continue to STAY AWESOME!


	5. Five

_Chapter Five_

The street outside the big front window of Angelo's club is open to the busy side street outside, where the cars pass noisily and their horns blend with the brass on stage. Sherlock's head is turned to look out into the traffic, watching the building across the street (the location advertised, 22 Northumberland Street, and completely lightless). Not ignoring John, not really.

John pushes the last of his food around on his plate, and he convinces himself to look across the table (still has the look of the stage in him; hairline damp from the heat of the lights, and his collar, where his impossibly long neck is twisted to stare out the window; somehow casual and tensed to spring at the same time, curiously catlike, tapping fingers like the twitching tail).

"You wanted me here at eight," John says suddenly. Sherlock's eyes flick over, but nothing else moves.

"And you came promptly," Sherlock supplies, jaw resting neatly in his hand.

"You could've told me to come at half-eight and we could've had dinner." John wants to hide from the pride gleaming in Sherlock's eyes. "But you said eight. So I could see you play."

Sherlock takes a moment, doesn't immediately answer, and his eyes go back to the building across the street. "What did you think?" he asks at last (almost as if he doesn't want to be facing John when judgment comes).

"Am I supposed to be impressed?" John asks (he is).

Sherlock's lips curl upward, slowly. "Yes."

There's a moment, then, looking Sherlock in the eye when he finally does turn it back to John. It's quiet, and it's certainly not earth-shattering. But even with the words of Sherlock's brother echoing in John's brain (_you wouldn't be defending him_), even knowing two things about the man across from him aside from his name—it's despite of all of that, maybe even slightly _because_—John knows that it doesn't matter.

He's hated strangers before because of the smug uni boy look that got them out of service, he's no stranger to anger on that count. But this time it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if Sherlock Holmes was code breaking for Jerry, because this one's interesting. This one's clever and odd and (if his pulse is any indicator) utterly exciting.

(Maybe Sherlock sees it.)

"So you play the violin," John says. "And sometimes you don't stop talking. Anything else I should know?"

Sherlock's smirk grows even wider. "I keep odd hours. I rarely sleep for more than four a night, when I do sleep. I haven't ever blown a hole in a flat with my experiments, but when the occasional poisonous fume needs venting and the building evacuated, I'm commonly asked to leave."

John shouldn't be smiling; it sounds downright villainous.

"What about friends?" John asks.

"Is that normal?" Sherlock replies (and John's only noticed he hasn't ordered any food).

John shrugs. "People have friends 'round. Family sometimes, but I met your brother and I have to say I'm not particularly looking forward to future meet-ups." Sherlock chuckles silently at this, eyes slant and grey and watching _John_. Almost nervously, John drops his eyes and adds: "Having girls 'round."

Sherlock contemplates for only the space of a breath, and his voice is rather more quiet than it was before. "Having girls 'round, no. Girls aren't really our area, are they?"

It takes a moment. A stupid, blinking moment. John's shoved his chair backward in shock and embarrassment before it even fully registers. Sherlock's voice is almost like a pair of hands on John's shoulders holding him down when he hisses: "Don't get up, _idiot_, unless you want the entire club knowing I've propositioned you."

John's face is a shameful shade of red, a color he's sure it hasn't been in years (and he hadn't even been sure up until now that it could even make the shade again), but he stays put. Swallows his pride and stays put. Damning and careful eyes on Sherlock's unreadable face.

(Would he call him out in front of everyone? No, he'd stopped John from rising and bringing attention to them, it can't have been that. Had it only been for John's reaction? No, Sherlock's too smart for that, that's a cheap trick. It was for information; because Sherlock would have known from the very moment he met John, but now John knows...)

When Sherlock continues, his voice is low and his eyes have gone back to watching the window. "You'd questioned your sexuality most of your life, until you could finally experiment in the close quarters the army provided."

"It wasn't—" John hisses harshly, and he feels dizzy from the blood in his head. But he manages to calm himself a degree. Somehow. "It wasn't an _experiment_. God, you make it sound so clinical and..." John frowns, something old and sad tugging at the edges of his mouth and knotting up on his brow (he has lines there, more than a man his age should). "No, it wasn't—" He cuts himself off because it sounds too downcast, even for him.

When he manages a glance up, Sherlock's sharp face has somehow softened, just so much. "But I'm right," he adds. It's unarguably a statement.

"Yes," John murmurs, and his plate must be very interesting, for the amount of time his eyes linger there.

"And now that you're a civilian again," Sherlock continues, "you're afraid to act on what came naturally in the field."

"Stop doing that," John snaps, eyes solidly down.

"Doing what?"

"Getting inside my head." And he looks up sharply. "Yes, you're right, but that doesn't mean that I have to appreciate it."

Sherlock is sporting a look of shock (rather mild surprise, but it seems magnified on Sherlock's usually calm face), and he tilts his head before he speaks again. "I don't understand how it's any different from reading your military history or your failure to earn certification."

"It's—it's—" John tries several times, halfway to desperate, before he checks himself and clinches his teeth. "Look, it's more personal than all that, Sherlock."

Sherlock matches his frown slightly, and John nearly brightens at the childish way the man's brow furrows and his lips purse. It's all very different suddenly, and the conversation has managed to shift John's entire perception with so little movement, with such a little push. The world hasn't shifted, they have. And he can see Sherlock as if someone has thrown a bright spotlight on him, altogether a different man than the one he met at Mike Stamford's garden party. That man was dimly-lit, wreathed in obscuring smoke and hiding behind a cat's smile. This one is washed out by the light, overexposed and utterly human.

"So," John says, and suddenly his eyes aren't wavering (whether it's true bravery or simply courage under fire, he doesn't question). "Are you?"

"Am I what?"

"Propositioning me."

There's a moment, then, where neither of them is smiling, and they lock eyes across the table. John's never felt so read. Sherlock opens his mouth once, stops. Before he tries again, his eyes tick to the window as if it's some safe bastion where he can hide from John's, but then he sees something. John knows he's seen something because of the grin bouncing onto Sherlock's lips.

His eyes find John's. "He's here."

John's eyes go to the window in all haste, scanning the street outside for any sign of anyone villainous. And it looks just as normal as John has ever seen the streets of London, though granted he can't see much for the faces or the people inside the myriad automobiles puttering by.

The music has gone quiet: conserved, dark piano, soft brush of the drums, and Sally Donovan's sad voice hitting the high, lonely notes. John's eyes are certainly searching for whatever Sherlock has seen, but it's a bit difficult with the both of them leaning half out of their chairs and across the table to see better into the darkness outside, and the veteran's eyes linger more on the white curve of Sherlock's neck out of his dark collar. Oh, he can't ignore the fact that the man's attractive anymore, not especially after knowing that the both of them—

"There," Sherlock says, nodding his head to the dark car parked across the street, engine still running, and one single man inside.

"That's a cab," John notes, his brows knitting. "Looks like any other cab. Why's it a cab?" He turns his eyes back to Sherlock, questioning, and _oh_ they've gotten close since he looked away.

"Who picks up a prostitute on accident?" Sherlock says, grinning like a boy.

It blows John completely, and everything fits together, sliding like a puzzle into a complete picture. "Oh my God," John murmurs incredulously.

Sherlock couldn't look happier. "That's how he finds his victims, _they_ pick _him_. All except Jennie Wilson; they certainly had different ideas on what they were getting out of the ride. Oh, that's _brilliant_. They're the invisible killer, something we don't notice go by us every hour of every day. And he can blend back in just like a shadow." Sherlock gives a victorious laugh and suddenly he's on his feet again, throwing his coat on.

"Where are you going?" John asks, suddenly defensive.

"I told you it could be dangerous," Sherlock says gleefully, and he sweeps his violin case from the floor and takes off at a dash for the door.

John hardly gives a second thought, wrangling his limbs into his coat as he follows at a hard trot. Cane still leaning lonely against his abandoned chair.

The air is like ice when they step out of the stiflingly-hot club, and John takes an immediate shuddering breath as he pulls his coat tightly around him. Sherlock comes to a halt, violin case like a pendulum in his arm with momentum lost, as he stares across at the cab. Waiting for it to make a move? Calculating when to make one on his own?

"Sherlock?" John asks, cutting into the cold air to ask those questions, but Sherlock cuts him off with a terse noise between his teeth, because the figure in the cab has noticed them. Turned toward them, seen them staring, and suddenly the vehicle is moving. Moving with all the speed it can afford in close traffic—not rushing but certainly not taking its sweet time.

Sherlock gives a curse and he bolts suddenly out into traffic, and if it hadn't been for John's quick reflexes to rush forward and pull the lanky man out from the trajectory of a fast-moving car, he and his violin would have been hit. The two of them move through the momentum of John's saving embrace, nearly dancing through opposing traffic and the screeching sound of tires and loud curses in the stiff night air (and John swears that he hears Sherlock _laughing_) until they're safe on the opposite side of the street.

John takes the first desperate strides after the cab, eyes locking on the number and fixing it into his brain. "I've got the number," he calls over his shoulder, and he's nearly bowled over in turn as Sherlock rushes up to him.

"Good for you," Sherlock snaps, and in an instant he's grabbed John by the wrist and tugged him urgently off in a completely arbitrary direction.

John hopelessly follows, apologizing in Sherlock's wake as he shoves by drunks and ladies alike.

Sherlock leaps over a barrier, and John follows, running like he hasn't in years. He follows Sherlock's eyes when he turns his head, catches glimpses of the cab on a parallel street, and suddenly they veer off again. John always reliably five feet behind so that he won't be caught by surprise when Sherlock takes a new route and be left behind. The last thing he needs is to be left behind (and Sherlock isn't waiting, but he isn't going to leave John behind either).

And then they're vaulting up a fire escape, climbing arm over arm onto the roof and running diagonal over London. Taking long running jumps over skylights, dodging architecture at every turn. And then, with no warning, Sherlock takes the gap between buildings in a graceful arc, violin case acting as a counter weight and keeping him balanced in the air as he goes sailing.

John pauses for a hopeless moment, the drop below him looking infinitely deep, before Sherlock's voice calls him back: "Come on, John! Don't be a coward!"

That fixes him, sets the strength back in his legs (leaping across the trench to pull a man out of range of the machine guns chewing into the meat of his legs, _that's_ not cowardice), and John takes a hard landing right next to Sherlock. Nearly tumbles through with it, but Sherlock tugs solidly on his arm and they're off and pounding across the roof again.

Down they leap, over barriers, down the gutter of a building where the loud, carnal beat of jazz pounds and pounds and fills up the air and thrums in their lungs along with the cold sting of January air with every sharp inhale. They hit the street again, a back alley where the homeless scatter like rats when the two of them land amongst them from on high. But they're still too late, and John can see the cab go rushing by the mouth of the alley before they get to it.

Sherlock curses again, but he's stopped his forward momentum at last.

John catches fully up, leans haggardly on the nearest wall to catch his breath. "What now?"

The tall man shakes his head and falls heavily onto the same wall John's found to lean against. "Oh, it was perfect!" he laments. He growls his disappointment one more time before turning his eyes down to John. "You said you got the number?"

"Yeah," John wheezes, and suddenly, unexplainably, he's laughing. Full-lunged, hard laughter that shakes his body to his toes. "Oh God," he manages around the convulsions, grinning like a fool, "that was ridiculous."

He breaks his words off to glance up at Sherlock, whose own stoic face is cracking hopelessly into a weary grin.

"That was the _most_ ridiculous thing I've ever done," John murmurs, trying to straighten out.

But Sherlock has caught it, whatever's brought the laughter on, and his own voice is interrupted by it. "And you were in the Somme."

Completely inappropriate giggles suddenly burst from John's mouth, which take the both of them by surprise. "That wasn't just me," John says after he's tried finding his breath three times. "Me and you. And."

And John shouldn't be giggling, shouldn't be fighting for breath around laughter that won't die. But he is. Sherlock is very much like the front: trenches filled with gas, and pounding feet and hearts. And the running, oh, that'd spiked his heart rate, filled his head with barked orders and the rumble of mortars in the cold, smoky air. And it melds with the smoky air twined with jazz, the mortars drumbeats in his head and there's Sherlock Holmes on the stage.

Maybe it's that dichotomy, maybe it's the swimming in his adrenaline-filled head or his pumping heart, that makes him take Sherlock's tie in his fingers and yank him downward.

Practically nose to nose, sharing the same air (hot now, not the cold stinging in his lungs but burning). Harsh breaths gone terse in proximity with eyes wandering in this new closeness. Sherlock tilts his head (his eyes are half-shut, not squinting but languid, and it's gorgeous), John wets his lips thoughtlessly.

"You _miss_ the war," Sherlock remarks quietly. "You like it dangerous,"

"So do you," John replies.

Sherlock's smile is a slow curl of smoke. "Oh, I think we're going to get on fabulously, John Watson." He touches his nose to John's, and it's almost too close. "Forget something?"

At first John doesn't understand (and he tries not to admit the throbbing that goes all the way to his toes when Sherlock touches him, just that little bit, oh it's been a long time), and it's only at Sherlock's mischievous grin that John realizes his other hand is unusually empty. _His cane_. He'd left it back at Angelo's.

"I—shit," John murmurs, and he stumbles back, expecting the pain to shoot up his leg as it usually does. But not this time. Almost as if it had never pained him before. John looks down at his leg in astonishment, then back up to the detective with disbelief blowing wide in his eyes. "How...?"

"It was Freud who developed the idea," Sherlock says vaguely, blithely, "that repression in the mind impedes normal physical function. He called it _psychosomatic_."

"What on earth are you talking about?" John asks breathlessly.

"It's in your head, John," Sherlock elucidates, and he turns quickly on heel. "Have you a pen on you?"

John pats at his pockets and finds one, handing it over blindly (still trying to wrap his mind around shifting from extreme to extreme so quickly; face to face and suddenly chasing after him again). Sherlock takes it and asks John aloud what the cab number had been. John, naturally, provides the number Sherlock jots it down on a scrap of paper, which he folds into a fiver.

Bending down to one of the vagrants in the alley, Sherlock asks blandly about the weather, and the girl replies in an equally colorless tone. Anyone could have missed Sherlock passing the girl the fiver and the note, but John knows what's on that scrap of paper. That done, Sherlock hops back to full height and rejoins John as if nothing—not the chase, not the near-kiss, not even staring up at him on the smoky stage—had happened.

"Baker Street?" he asks. "Unless you'd rather back to Angelo's to finish eating?"

"No, no," John interrupts, "wait a second. We didn't chase that cab for nothing."

"No, we didn't," Sherlock says, starting off again and expecting John to follow (he does). "Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find it again. Or it will find us."

Watching the side of Sherlock's face for any sort of information, John nods slightly. "Baker Street, then."

They keep a studied distance between them as they walk back to the flat, room enough for Sherlock's violin to swing merrily at his side. Room enough for no one to ask questions. Room enough for John's mind to buzz with them.

* * *

AN: Well, these two sure got to the point rather quickly, didn't they? I'm sure most people know, but just in case you don't: you could be arrested for homosexuality in this era, so it's generally not a good idea to point it out. Anyhoo, I've probably got two or three more chapters in this bad boy but DON'T WALK AWAY because I have more stories planned for Jazzverse! Thanks for reading so far, leave us some love, and don't forget to STAY AWESOME!


	6. Six

_Chapter Six_

There's hardly any room to breathe between them when they enter the foyer, halfway to hanging up their coats before Sherlock's violin case thumps against the back of John's knee, nudging him closer with a not so subtle hint. John takes it, steps into Sherlock's space, eyes the line of the man's neck.

"I get _you_," John murmurs.

"Do you?" Sherlock muses, one eyebrow quirking high.

"Well, _look_ at you. Hell, you could have anyone you wanted. Probably have." When Sherlock gives an airy laugh, John feels emboldened. "What I don't get is—why me?" John certainly hasn't raised his eyes (isn't ready for that scrutiny). "Because I'm _here_?" Convenience seems as though it'd fit Sherlock Holmes splendidly.

"Because," Sherlock says, and his neck moves as his head tilts sideways to peer at the ceiling in thought. "You're interesting. And that's far more difficult for me to find than a willing man in London."

John scoffs. "Me, interesting? Where've _you_ been the last two days?"

"John," Sherlock says, and though it's low, it's strong and broaches no argument. "Trust me when I say that I find very little to be of interest in this world anymore, and more than half of what I _do_ involves the dead or the dying and what put them there." And John feels something bump lightly into his chin, and Sherlock's violin case nudges John's face up to look directly into Sherlock's. "Now. With that out of the way."

At first, John opens his mouth to protest. And then he reasons that he has nothing to protest against.

Fortunately, John's used to the front, ears always alert, and he hears the footsteps coming before they have a chance to see anything incriminating. John takes an easy step out of Sherlock's space and quickly hangs up the coat that's been hanging heavy in his hand. Thankfully, Sherlock is clever enough not to follow.

Instead he turns and puts on a smile. "Mrs. Hudson. You're still awake?" But John sees Sherlock's smile drop just as soon as he registers the unwonted apprehension and sadness welling up in the woman's face.

"Mrs. Hudson?" John asked, taking a concerned step forward.

"I tried to stop them, Sherlock," Mrs. Hudson says, voice cracking. "I know you've got your little experiments on, I know you wouldn't want anyone getting at them. Oh, Sherlock, what's going on now?"

The detective's mouth presses to a thin line, and he's already hopping up the steps in twos before John can register to follow (not before giving Mrs. Hudson's shoulder a comforting squeeze). He's not too far behind, especially when Sherlock grinds to a halt in the doorway to the sitting room.

John's not sure if he's walked into another crime scene. This one's certainly more active than Jennie Wilson's flat, with uniformed bobbies striding through Baker Street like it were Wall Street, and it's a wonder they didn't hear the racket the moment they walked through the door (but, to be fair, John had had several more important things on his mind). John feels like a dog, perched behind Sherlock's shoulder and baring his teeth at the men invading his space. _His space_—he hasn't even moved into the nondescript flat in the middle of London and already it's his. John's territory, with unwelcome feet treading his carpet and upturning his sofa cushions and scattering his detective's newsprint all over the sitting room.

"What's all this?" John all but barks, and there's military in him still, enough to stop the three nearest bobbies in their tracks. And when they stop, that's when a familiar face appears from the kitchen to join them.

"You lot, keep working," Inspector Lestrade orders, and those who've stopped get back to their work. Folding his arms, Lestrade turns to John and Sherlock in the doorway with smug lines in his face. "You're in a lot of trouble, Sherlock."

"Get out," Sherlock demands, and John can practically feel the hackles rise on the man beside him. "You haven't got any reason to be rifling through my things—"

"I'm a Detective Inspector," Lestrade shoots back. "I can do whatever I want to get my work done. I can get through your door any time I want and find out what you've been hiding from me. And I know you're hiding something."

"Sir!" A horribly rat-faced man appears from the stairs that lead to the second floor (it's not even his room yet and John is still prickling with rage that _someone's been in there_). "Blue, right?"

Lestrade shoots them both a self-satisfied look that almost smolders in its own smugness. "Blue's right, Anderson. You got it?"

The man Anderson fixes Sherlock with a baleful sneer that speaks of so many past experiences, and produces the bright blue handbag. Lestrade takes it when offered and opens it up to inspect the contents. "This is _police _business. I could arrest you for this."

"For what?" John spits, and Sherlock goes still beside him. John spares a glance, and Sherlock isn't looking at him. But now there are eyes on John, eyes that had been on Sherlock (lanky, queer Sherlock; the anomaly they're all used to), and he feels as though he really should have stayed quiet.

"Withholding evidence on an ongoing investigation," Lestrade says, slightly stronger than he had been. Yes, dealing with Sherlock is something he's used to, but now there's a short ex-army doctor standing up to him as well. It makes John feel most unwelcome. "Stealing my case out from under me. _Again_." The last comes out at a bark, and now _everyone_ is looking at John.

So John straightens his spine (and _now_ he can see Sherlock's gray eyes peering hopelessly down at him, at the same time disapproving and intrigued). "You haven't got any warrants—"

"And you haven't got any right to walk onto a crime scene," Lestrade cuts in. Jerking a thumb at Sherlock, he adds: "Neither does he. I _let_ you do your little dance because I need answers, but when you keep things from me, I have every right to make your lives a living hell. Got that, Captain?"

John literally clamps his teeth to his tongue to keep from shouting military-grade abuse at the man, but his eyes sear with everything he holds back. Lestrade must see it, but even John has to acknowledge him when he doesn't back down. But his shoulders do lose some of their rigidity.

"I want this bastard off the street as much as anyone," Lestrade growls. "But you've got to help me so I can help you."

Sherlock's mouth pulls down only minutely, and his fingers tense on the violin case still in hand. When he opens his mouth, his voice is no different from his normal timbre, but it's firm and dark and it seems infinitely loud in John's ears. "You'll not threaten my flatmate, Lestrade. I found the handbag, I kept it from you. Make no delusions on who you can and cannot arrest. Clear?"

John does his best not to stare rapturously. Not the best course of action with their flat full of bobbies. So he checks himself, just barely.

Lestrade grits his teeth. "What was in the handbag?"

"Nothing important," Sherlock replies almost flippantly.

"Bollocks," Lestrade shoots back. "Why keep it a secret, then?"

Sherlock shrugs. "I had a gig."

John turns his unexpected laugh into a snort.

"You've got something out of this," Lestrade says, taking a step forward and shaking the handbag in Sherlock's face as if at a disobedient dog. "You deduced something and you're not telling me, and that's a really _bad_ idea, Sherlock."

"Just tell him," John cuts in. Both Lestrade and Sherlock fix John with a confused stare, nearly identical, and it's a wonder John remains as straight-faced as he does. "It's no good if he arrests you just because you won't tell him about the address."

For the space between blinks, Sherlock's eyes say _oh I could kiss you_, and then it's gone.

Lestrade's proverbial ears prick up, and suddenly John is the most welcome man in the room. "What address?"

Sherlock (who is clearly the better actor, neither of them care to deny it) gives a horrible, grumbling sigh, and the glare he pins John under is like brimstone.

"Sherlock, what address?" Lestrade demands, focus cleverly diverted from John.

"I don't see how it matters now—"

"Give it over."

"Fine," Sherlock snaps at last, and now he's stepped into Lestrade's space and sneering down at him. "And then you get out of our flat."

_Our flat_, it has a nice ring to it, John thinks.

John doesn't see what address Sherlock scribbles down for Lestrade, but he does a good job of playing up the reluctant informant (pouting a bit like a child and throwing scathing glances at all the bobbies that have stopped their activity to stare at him). Lestrade calls them off and they're off down the stairs in a rush of bodies that seem to blur by John. The inspector barking orders over his shoulder at the mass of bodies following after him, and in their haste, they completely forget about the two men left in the flat.

The very empty, suddenly very quiet flat. With Sherlock staring across the room at John in a composed, calculating way—John feeling inspected, but he lets it happen. Being alone in a flat with Sherlock Holmes hadn't been a problem ten hours ago. It technically wasn't a problem now.

"Clever," Sherlock says quietly, and he leans down to place his violin case carefully on the floor beside his desk.

"Thanks," John replies, not sure why he feels that the compliment is much more flattering coming from Sherlock Holmes rather than anyone else. He takes a breath, deeper than he thought he'd need, and there's something unfinished hanging in the air between them that he's sure both of them know is there. It's whether or not he chooses to act on it (and he's not sure why it has to be him, but it does) that matters.

John takes a step forward, and Sherlock doesn't move (apart from his eyes, which light up, alert, like there's a torch shining in them). Lingers for a moment, as if making up his mind, and then takes the rest of the space necessary to fully approach Sherlock. A respectable foot of space between them. A very calculated foot of space. John takes another breath (this one not tinged with chlorine or iodine or gangrene, but it may as well be for the way his heart is clamoring on).

"You'll take the second bedroom," Sherlock says at last, when John doesn't make another move. "The room upstairs is furnished in the late Mr. Hudson's things that were too useful to be thrown out. You're tired, and it's a long way back to yours. Besides, that mattress of yours was no good for your shoulder. So, you'll spend the night here, find you like it."

"Will I?" John laughs lowly, doesn't ask how Sherlock knows about his shoulder. "I haven't even seen the second bedroom. How am I supposed to know I'll like it?"

Sherlock gives a quiet, derisive noise through his nose. "You're welcome to go ahead and see if it's up to your standards before you sign anything, John."

John can feel the strain between his lungs that he's come to associate with the ticking anticipation between mortar drops, and now with staring up into two gray eyes. It's now; the charge is now. John bucks up his courage, leans in and murmurs: "Come with me."

At first, neither of them moves, and the moment goes until John's waiting for a rejection, a laugh, anything to break the silence that's settled in. What he gets is a smile. Slowly.

"Go to your room, John," Sherlock insists (how has his voice gotten _deeper_?), loosening the tie from around his neck. And he turns away.

"Sherlock," John calls out before he can stop up his throat, and he cringes at the sound of his own voice. But the detective does turn back, once he's five steps away and nearly to the kitchen anyhow. (His eyes look like smoke.) John gives a shaky exhale, which bolsters his voice. "Most people say yes or no."

"I'm not _most people_," Sherlock corrects him. "And neither are you. And you've done a marvelous job of avoiding convention so far, I'd hate to see you go for the banal now." There's a hint of his tongue when it thoughtlessly wets his lips. "Go to your room, John."

And the ex-RAMC man finds himself doing just that. It's only once he's up the flight of stairs and tucked into the surprisingly-spacious room that he realizes he's done so. By the way his heart is thumping, his fingers should be shaking as they undo the knot of his tie and slide it off. But they didn't shake when he sewed a man's face back together, and they don't shake now as he works his braces off and waits for Sherlock Holmes.

(The part of his brain that isn't focused to a sharp point by the memory of long fingers working up the neck of the violin actually does take stock of the room, and the far left corner would be an ideal place for all his books and it seems like there's an abundance of closet space where he can put his trunk so it won't take up room at the foot of the bed; thoughts of the old but clean-looking divan fight for dominance over those involving Sherlock's lips pressed around a cigarette, bowed to blow a line of smoke into the cold air, and John suddenly wishes for two brains so he can keep at least semi-coherent even to himself.)

He doesn't know how much time passes until he's aware that he's still alone in the upstairs bedroom, aware when a chill from some patch of cold air hits the collar he's undone just enough to be open and encouraging. John's sitting alone on the edge of a bed that isn't his (yet), where he's been sent, and no one's come after him. There's a shameful twist in his middle that translates to his ears, but he chokes both of them down with simple solidarity. He stands quickly, and thankfully there's blood in his head this time so he doesn't topple out his door and down the stairs in one graceless move.

Once he's made his way back down to the sitting room, John tentatively calls out, "Sherlock?"

It looks as though no one is even in, as if the police had stormed through, torn apart everything that they could, and vacated. Oddly, horribly empty with papers strewn about and books on the ground where they've been tossed. No sign of the consulting detective on the first pass through, and not even when he cautiously pads down the corridor to Sherlock's own room. John feels heated embarrassment crawling up his neck—he's been _left_. Told to go to his room and _left_. A spectacular fool, John Watson.

There's a niggling something, however, chewing at the back of his mind before he can gather up his things and storm uselessly away like a kid picked last for a game. Sherlock is gone, yes, but there's something that's _not_ missing that troubles the spot in John's brain. Sherlock's coat, clearly visible on the peg behind the half-closed door to the stairwell.

John gathers himself—perhaps Sherlock stepped downstairs to clear up the situation with Mrs. Hudson, maybe speaking with her was taking longer than expected and John hadn't been so much abandoned as delayed. Swallowing hope (and the thought of where Sherlock would have gone without his coat in January if not to see the old woman), John heads quickly down the stairs to the ground floor.

"Mrs. Hudson?" John calls even before he's left the stairs, and he finds her already out her door with a tea tray in hand.

"Oh, John dearie," she says happily, "I heard all those dreadful policemen leave and I thought I'd come up with some tea for the two of you. I know how Sherlock likes his, but I wasn't sure about... What ever is the matter, John?" She finally notices the agitated state of John's eyebrows, the way his fingers are desperately clamping the banister.

"So you didn't see Sherlock leave?" John asks, and he hopes it doesn't sound as desperate as it feels.

"See him leave? No," she says, tilting her head to think. "Oh, but I did hear the cabbie at the door, maybe his cab came early. He does like to run off without telling anyone where he's off to, that boy."

John's stomach drops out. "Well, how long ago was that?" Dammit, he should've been paying more attention!

"Oh, somewhere about twenty minutes past, I'd say." She hardly finishes her sentence before John cuts off a curse and takes the last two steps at a leap and grabs his coat from the peg in the foyer. He's out the door, leaving Mrs. Hudson and her tea without another word.

He doesn't know what he's expecting when he bursts out the door and onto the street. Twenty minutes, that's long enough to get well into the city at this time of night.

(It could've just been a cab, Sherlock could've just got into a cab and gone off and forgotten John was there. But it doesn't fit right, because he remembers Sherlock waiting right at the gap between buildings—could have run on and probably would have caught the cab if he hadn't waited for John to jump after him, but he waited. He hadn't left John behind, and all thoughts of embarrassment are long gone, because he hadn't left John behind.)

And just when his warring brain tries to tear him down both ways down the street at once, there's movement from beside him. A destitute-looking young man, no more than a boy really, and he's looking right at John from under a ratty hat.

"You live here?" the boy asks pointedly, nodding at the door to the flat behind him.

John nods before he can stop himself (too focused on the thoughts _Sherlock_ and _cab_ to worry about much else), and the boy holds out a scrap of paper. With his duty done, the boy moves away quickly and disappears.

There's a single line scrawled to paper, and it feels as though John's heart squeezes tight enough to lay him out flat. He shoves the paper into his pocket, the pocket where he's had his pistol all night, and he runs.

* * *

AN: Cliffhanger! Mwaha. Anyhow, looks like there will be one more chapter after this one (maybe two if the next one gets too long, but after the 11,000 words of Year Five of Magic of Deduction, NOTHING is a long chapter anymore. Oh, and I suppose I should add that my jazzfetish basically translates into an overall violinkink, so I apologize even further! I CAN'T HELP IT! A million thanks to Lady Dan Beta. Anyway, hope this is still entertaining for you folks, leave us some love, and most of all STAY AWESOME!


	7. Seven

_Chapter Seven_

There's a part of John Watson that knows if he takes the second bedroom at 221b Baker Street, he will be doing this for the rest of his life (as long as he can live, with the sort of danger that he seems so capable of getting himself into). He's sure that chasing after Sherlock Holmes is just something that comes with the territory of sharing a flat with Sherlock Holmes. Feet pounding the pavement, heart beating so hard it clogs his throat, running toward danger rather than away from it—and John knows he's absolutely done for, because a man's life could depend on how fast he can force his body to run and (aside from the terror of impending death for one or both of them) John is having the time of his life. He'll blame the adrenaline later, he's sure, and he's mad as hell at Sherlock for dragging them into this, but this is something he can (will, has to) get used to.

The cab is parked right outside the address from the scrap of paper, sitting dark and empty outside the dark and empty building across from Angelo's. 22 Northumberland Street. John skids to a halt, throws his eyes up the side of the building and assesses the situation in a manner of seconds (something he learned the hard way, years of it etched into him like his veins), and turns away to dash to the noisy club across the street.

He doesn't recognize the boy just inside the door, so he snaps: "Get me Angelo. Tell him Sherlock needs him." Everything is terse, and his pulse never settles even in the thirty seconds he waits for Angelo to appear (hurrying as quickly a man his build can).

"Mister Watson?" Angelo asks, but before he can finish, John cuts in.

"Police. Ask for Lestrade. I'll be across the street." He doesn't wait to see if the man will comply. He's far too busy dodging traffic and running headfirst into danger.

The corridors are quiet. There's something terrifying and lonely about an empty building. Not abandoned, John thinks, reaching for the pistol in his pocket, but _empty_. Something that should be filled with people and noise deathly quiet, cold. It's the silence he can't stand. The silence between mortar drops, that's what makes his blood run like ice in the middle of the night. Silence stuffed like cotton between his ears, hugging every corner of the dark corridor. It sticks in John's throat, keeps him from calling out.

His fingers find their familiar grip on his gun (a gun he shouldn't have, as a medic, as a civilian, but a gun that feels like an old friend), and he moves quickly down the hallway. Looking for light, or movement, but most importantly _listening_. The silence is only good for one thing, and that's for finding something lost within it. Silence doesn't hide anything by any means (not crying in the dark, not curses aimed skyward at God, and not his flatmate with a murderous cab driver).

John wonders briefly, _so_ briefly, if he should have waited for the police. He dismisses it right out. The police are good for one thing, and that's for mucking about. They aren't bad for a contingency plan, but men more concerned with the weight of their wallet than the well-being of the people they should be protecting can't be trusted with being punctual, let alone the weight of the life John is planning on saving tonight. Even if Sherlock is completely capable of protecting himself, he was the one who got himself into danger in the first place, and John will be there to get him out if he has to.

How had it come to this so easily?

His mother had said once, before she died, that people are only one half of a soul. There is no telling when they will find the second half or who will be carrying it. Most of the time, they can't even tell that they've found them until, one day, they find themselves completely happy. John had asked if she'd found her other half, and all she'd had to say was _not yet_.

John heads up the stairs to the second floor, ears attuned and listening.

When he first hears voices, John presses himself to the wall, goes completely still, and he smirks. That's a voice he knows. And by the tone, he's not so sure that Sherlock will need him after all.

"Oh, I see. So _you're_ a proper genius _too_."

John isn't sure if he should move in. There's light shining from under one of the doors up the second floor corridor, so that's clearly where they've holed themselves up, but there's downright boredom in Sherlock's voice—so much so that John nearly laughs at having worked himself up so far as he has.

Nevertheless, he makes sure that there are bullets in his gun, turns the safety off, and pads closer to the door with the light under it. It's heavy wood, a small rectangular window stuck high up (not quite out of John's reach; if he stood on his toes it would be the perfect height for him), but he doesn't look through for fear of outing himself. It doesn't sound as though anything or anyone is putting Sherlock in any immediate danger (then again, John hasn't had the man in any life-threatening situations yet, boredom could simply be his coping mechanism), so he listens.

"It's a fifty-fifty chance," Sherlock drones, and John can practically hear the sneer in his voice.

Then comes a new voice. It's not the voice John would have expected of a killer. It sounds like it could belong to someone's father. "You're not playing the numbers, you're playing me." John wonders if the man looks like his father, too. "Did I just give you the good pill or the bad pill?"

John can't stand it anymore, goes to his toes, and peers through the corner of the window.

He catches a glimpse of the back of an older man's head (must be, his hair's completely white, under the shepherd's cap), Sherlock with an unreadable expression across from him, and two small glass bottles on the table between them. Sherlock's fingers steepled in thought, just touching his lips.

"Is it a bluff?" the murderer continues, and suddenly his voice doesn't sound so friendly. "Or a double bluff? Or a triple bluff?"

Sherlock snaps when he cuts in: "Still just chance."

"Four people in a row? It's not chance." There's a sadistic grin in his voice that John can hear, and he's glad he can't see it.

"Luck," Sherlock waves it off, and his eyes haven't left the man across from him (if he would just look up, John would wave his gun in the window, show him he's got Sherlock backed up, but then John doesn't know if the murderer has a gun on him under the table or—)

"It's _genius_," the cabbie says, his pride oozing out of his voice.

John takes a harder look at the situation laid out before him, and Sherlock's voice turns into a dark curtain behind his train of thought. Two bottles. There's pills in those bottles—one pill per bottle, and one of them is closer to Sherlock than the other. Fifty-fifty chance, Sherlock had said. Two bottles, two pills, two choices. Four people in a row; this was the way that the murderer had done it each time, with a bottle for each of them, and the sadistic choice that you hope is the right one. John turns every pill he's ever come into contact with over in his head, trying to make heads or tails out of the ones he can barely glimpse in the glass bottles (at least one of them must be deadly, if his assessment of Jennie Wilson is any indication), but from his position at the window, they look nearly identical. Must be, if Sherlock is expected to choose the one that _won't_ kill him, and—

There's a noise in the corridor behind him, and John spins noiselessly away from the window at the door with his gun ready. Nothing. Nothing he can see in the half-darkness, anyhow. And he's still for an inordinate amount of time, listening now to his surroundings rather than the voices through the door (though he does catch a snatch of "a name no one says").

When John turns back, he hears the murderer utter the words: "Enough chatter. Time to choose."

John has his hand on the door handle, and there's a spike in his pulse when he feels the resistance of a lock.

Sherlock cocks his head, and then he stands. "No, I don't think I will. I can just walk out whenever I like."

John hadn't expected that. Neither had the cabbie, it seems. John takes quick steps away from the door, matching the sound of Sherlock's footsteps heading in his direction. He must be nearly to the door when the voice of the cabbie rings out again.

"Just before you go, did you figure it out?" Coercion, and cleverness. Oh yes, that voice is clever, hitting the right notes and flicking the switches he knows will turn Sherlock back around. "Which one's the good bottle?"

John can't see Sherlock from his position pulled away from the window (Sherlock isn't even turned to the door anymore, he can hear it in the detective's voice). "Of course. Child's play."

Oh, but he's not sure. He thinks he knows, but it's a guess. Dammit, Sherlock, you don't risk your life on a guess, not on one like this.

"Well?" Now the murderer's voice is all playful, not as dark as it had been moments ago (how long had John been turned away?) "Which one would you have picked? Just so I know whether I would have beaten you."

And then Sherlock turns completely, back toward the killer, John can hear it loud in his ears.

"_Play the game_."

The pill rattles in the bottle when Sherlock snatches it off the table, pops off the lid, and stares it down. And John has had enough, because he is going to take that damn pill—they both know it's fifty-fifty, and Sherlock may be ready to throw his life away for that but John sure as hell isn't.

So he kicks the door in.

His gun hand is dead steady, level with the head of the cabbie from across the room, John's stance solid. Sherlock is standing there, in the corner of his eye, pill still in hand. He doesn't look surprised at all (maybe John is imagining the smirk growing on the tall man's face).

"How long were you standing out there?" Sherlock asks, amusement low in his voice.

"Shut up," John snaps back, and he can't help the smile that wants to force its way to his mouth. He settles back into a stern frown for the murderer his weapon is leveled at. "Don't you move. The police are on their way, and they'd just love to get their hands on you."

The cabbie lets his mouth drop open, but Sherlock interjects with a derisive sigh. "The police, John? Honestly? You expect them to handle this with any sense of decorum or grace? Or competence?"

"You don't get to talk." John hasn't turned his head from the cabbie, but the words are for Sherlock. "You nearly poisoned yourself to prove you're clever."

"I was right," Sherlock defends himself, hurt.

"No, you weren't," John says, his eyes finally flicking to Sherlock, to the pill held between thumb and forefinger.

Sherlock frowns petulantly at first. And then his own eyes drop to the pill, contemplate, and find John again. They're different, somehow.

The cabbie shifts in John's peripheral vision, and he suddenly snaps back to attention. "Don't," John growls. The cabbie stands, and John takes a step forward (suddenly between Sherlock and the man that wanted to kill him), tensed and ready to spring. Everything screaming _back off_.

The moment that John sees a gun in the man's hand, something takes over. As if his conscious mind takes a seat and lets something else take the reins. And when he blinks and the world comes back in around him, it's from the other side of a gunshot wound. The cabbie buckles backward, a neat hole punched into his chest, and then he's down.

_Now_ Sherlock is surprised.

John's hand is still steady when he drops his gun arm to his side and looks at the aftermath of what he's just caused. Towering over the murderer, Sherlock kicks the downed man's gun away. There's something on Sherlock's face he tries to banish, something still lingering in shock. He shouts instead.

"You said you had a sponsor," he snaps at the man dying on the ground, blood seeping into the floorboards (the sort of smell that will never come out, dark stains on the flagstones of churches in France that will never be clean). "Who was it?" Both he and Sherlock know they don't have long if they want any information, John is a crack shot and the man will be dead very soon. Sherlock gives a frustrated noise, and moves in.

Before he can do anything rash, John shouts in a voice that is used to giving orders, "_Answer him_." And the gun is on the murderer again.

A weak, horrible imitation of a voice cracks out from the floor: "Moriarty."

And then he dies.

Sherlock doesn't move, not until John has moved into his space to knock the pill out of the detective's clutches. It skitters across the floor, sticks in the man's blood, and is forgotten. The medic in him takes over, and he's turning Sherlock's face to get a better look at him, assess the situation, and most of all ask: "Are you all right?"

The detective nods once, meets John's eyes. Looking at him like John is an unsolved puzzle sitting in front of him, _unsolvable_.

"Hide your gun," Sherlock says.

Moments after John has stowed it out of sight in the band of his trousers, the police finally arrive.

* * *

AN: A bit shorter, but I made the executive decision to make the ending two shorter chapters rather than one long one (mostly because of the emotional shift between the two parts which will now serve as different chapters). I had someone tell me that the biggest change I made was not having John follow Sherlock into the building, but him acting as the moral voice for Sherlock to keep him from torturing the cabbie. I like that. It's like the Doctor needs someone to tell him when to stop because he doesn't have the ability himself. ANYHOO, final chapter coming soon! And if there's interest, I have even more jazz adventures planned for these two! Thanks for reading thus far, leave us some love and don't forget to STAY AWESOME!


	8. Eight

_Chapter Eight_

Half of the street has poured out to see what all the police cars are for. A mass stumbling of drunks and interested parties coming from their buildings and into the street to further block the traffic along with the police cars parked longways to stop any fleeing villains. John has no idea how long he's been pinned under Lestrade's questioning, but it's certainly been long enough for Angelo to throw off the lights in his club, toss out the last revelers, and shut the front doors firmly.

But Lestrade's questions are absolutely nothing compared to the look he's being pinned with by Sherlock Holmes. It's not the sort of look that Sherlock usually fixes anyone with (that's observation, deduction, close scrutiny that peels apart layers and layers of information to get to the heart of a matter in unblinking seconds). This asks no questions at all. Sherlock is just _looking_ at him, almost like a child seeing something he doesn't quite understand for the first time; there's no attempt to understand, just a careful, appreciative, wide-eyed stare.

And when he's not supplying an answer to the DI in front of him, John looks back.

They've been corralled separately (probably to see how and even if their stories will corroborate), but even John knows they're less interested in the_ how_ a murderer is dead as much as the fact that he _is_ dead. That's the way, John thinks with a brimming frown. So long as their work is done, even if they haven't done it themselves, they're happy. Most of them are probably miffed that Lestrade is keeping them out late to question them, and anyone in the surrounding buildings who might've heard the struggle (no one did, or will admit that they did; John's hesitance to cooperate with the bobbies is something shared by most of them, by most everyone).

"And you say he had his gun out," Lestrade asks for what feels like the seventh time. "On Sherlock."

"I told you," John reiterates. And then he feels bold—the whole night has been all about seeing how far he's willing to push himself, so why the hell not? "Why do you care?"

Lestrade's face does something strange. It's not angry or even confused. He looks almost amused, in a tired sort of way. "How long 've you known Sherlock, then?" Lestrade asks. It's not in the same vein of questioning, and it almost throws John off.

"Three days, or just about," John says, almost with a laugh. "Why? This have something to do with the cab driver?"

"No, it's—" Lestrade laughs, devoid of humor. "You already sound like him. Bet he's giving PC Atherton a hell of a time over there."

"So you're not getting anything useful out of us," John goes for the ultimatum. "It's late. Even you've got someplace to be."

Lestrade shakes his head. "I can take the two of you in, if I like. We can make it easy for everyone here if you cooperate."

John's eyes say _unlikely_, and Sherlock smirks and glances away from halfway across the street when he sees it.

Lestrade moves to Sherlock's side, where John hears Sherlock snap: "Your killer is dead, I can't see what more you want from us." Lestrade pulls PC Atherton away to talk privately, and that's when Sherlock takes a few quick, long-legged steps to arrive rather suddenly at John's side. He's smiling like a kid caught doing something he shouldn't have been.

"He seems properly ruffled," Sherlock notes.

"I don't like stupid questions," John mutters, and it only brightens Sherlock's smirk. The two of them watch the detective inspector and uniformed bobbie going over their notes, and after a moment of silence, Sherlock leans slightly toward John.

"Do…" Sherlock has never seemed hesitant about a question before, so John doesn't say anything to interrupt him. "Do you dance?" he manages at last, and his eyes tick up to John for confirmation or denial.

"Haven't had a reason to," John answers, and Sherlock's eyes deflate. So John amends: "And I've had a limp ever since I got back. So I can't say I'd know any of the steps."

There's a brief smile somewhere in Sherlock's face. "Let's get out of here," he drawls, finding his usual footing. "Leave Lestrade looking for us."

"To where?" John asks, and Sherlock grins even wider that running from the police isn't what John's questioning. "Not Baker Street, you asked me if I dance. But it's past two, all the clubs are shut up."

"John," Sherlock says with a shake of his head. "You _have_ been away too long. Come on." He nods his head away, and, with a careful gap between them, they slip away from the police blockade of the street.

And they end up in the alley behind Angelo's, not a stone's throw from Lestrade and the men John can already hear being ordered to find the pair of them. But John doesn't question his guide, especially when Sherlock throws open the cellar doors and hops down the stairs to where the sound of music is already swelling up to meet them. John unquestioningly follows, and shuts the doors after.

The young man John had run into only hours before, standing in the doorway heaving for breath and asking for Angelo, meets them at the heavy door at the bottom of the stairs. The young man smiles when he sees Sherlock, raises his eyebrows in John's direction. Sherlock assures the man (Billy, John finally grasps) that John is with him. Billy unlocks the door and holds it open for them as a wave of cool blue jazz pours over them.

The musicians are the same John had seen on stage when Sherlock had performed six hours ago (hell, it feels like _days_ ago), but there's some sort of renewed enthusiasm that's running through their fingers. That lady singer isn't with them, only the band, but their beat is thumping (gets right into John's chest and crowds out his heartbeat). It's a smaller affair than the club upstairs, and most of it is stage and dance floor. The bar takes up a sliver of the room, and only four small tables are crowded into the space that isn't filled with dancers.

It's the dancers that catch John's attention. Upstairs, it certainly hadn't been hand-holding ballroom dancing. But those folks upstairs had been white boys dancing with white girls. Even in the dim lighting, it's easy to see that underground, Angelo's takes on another face. White and black, it was a blur down here. Girls with their hands around other girls' waists, one bloke whispering in another bloke's ear—all of them dancing.

Well-hidden, the people no one else wants to see, the ones folks liked to pretend don't exist.

John has been so busy observing the underground club to notice that Sherlock is watching him expectantly. Because John has to know he can leave. He can leave any time he'd like, he doesn't have to come here with Sherlock at all. It's the choice that Sherlock gives him that makes up John's mind for him. He doesn't turn away from it, shoves his hands in his pocket, and says:

"You gonna buy me a drink, first?"

Sherlock breaks into a smile.

His drinks are on the house. Of course.

They don't dance. Not because John doesn't want to, he'd probably say yes if Sherlock asked him, but they don't. Sherlock's previous assuredness has faded away within the first minute of finding a seat (not hard, most of the feet are on the dance floor).

A quiet piano song takes over, and the dancers slow.

"John," Sherlock says at last. He settles into his chair, finds something very interesting on the table to stare at. John doesn't interrupt. "People have saved my life before. There's no denying that, I have a way for finding myself in more trouble than I mean to. Often."

The doctor smirks, and even though he doesn't see it, it seems to give Sherlock the encouragement to go on.

"There have been several times in which someone has saved my life because it's been his job to do so. Sometimes, it's even been saved on accident." Sherlock looks up, and when John doesn't break in and question this, there's a flare in Sherlock's eyes that gives him away. He's glad John doesn't ask—perhaps even proud that John's sensed as much.

Sherlock rather can't help when his long fingers move tentatively forward to brush at John's. The veteran doesn't stop him.

"No one has ever saved my life because he's _wanted_ to," Sherlock continues, even lower (hardly audible over the sudden flourish of the band).

_Oh_. That makes John's poor old heart jump, and he feels a bit like a teenager again for no good reason other than he's suddenly incredibly nervous and incredibly excited, and this is obviously new for both of them (not the physical attraction, of course not, they've had that in droves; the hand-holding and the feelings, _those_ are new). So John grips Sherlock's fingers back, twines them together, encases them.

Sherlock sighs (releases the breath he's had pent up, eases back into breathing). "John, I'll understand if you won't take the room. Knowing what it is I get up to."

John laughs, and it's loud enough to distract the nearest pairs of dancers (but neither of them care if they have an audience, not here).

"You need me," John says point-blank. No arguments. "The trouble you get in."

"Yes," Sherlock says, a low smile growing on his lips. "I suppose I do."

They don't dance. Because John has pulled his chair around to Sherlock's side, pressed shoulder to shoulder and linked by fingers stitched together on the table. John leans his head into Sherlock, listens as the detective gleans life stories off of the dancers, just listens to him talk. They hardly drink, the tension of the past few hours is enough to get their heads spinning, to pull loud and jarring laughter from them when it's not especially called for. They fit right in.

Angelo sees them out when they're sure the police have gone from across the street, and he gives John a broad wink and wishes them the best of luck. John almost asks _at what?_ before Sherlock grips his fingers tighter and pulls John up the stairs after him.

On their way to Baker Street, Sherlock lights up a cigarette and strikes up an inane conversation he knows neither of them are interested in, if only to maintain the illusion of two good old boys walking in the same direction, not two almost-lovers wanting to get back to their flat as soon as possible. With Sherlock's help, they pull it off rather well.

Mrs. Hudson's lights are off, she's long asleep. They hang their coats in the foyer, walk quietly up the stairs shoulder to shoulder. And there's a moment where they linger by the stairs to the third floor, toward the second bedroom (John's room, where he'd waited for twenty minutes and felt like a fool). Neither of them say anything, because there's an awful lot of baggage floating around in the air between them, so much that had happened in just this one day, one _night_. It's almost too much, and they both know it. So they linger, watching one another for one lead or one clue.

John moves first. Up into Sherlock's space, where he goes to his toes. And their faces meet halfway, almost awkward when their lips mash up against each other and their noses don't quite fit. John pulls back, tries not to look skittish, but Sherlock isn't finished with him. The detective leans down and completes their circuit again (because they'll learn the way they fit together, they have plenty of time). Nothing complicated, nothing rushed. Just the long press of mouths, lingering.

John quirks half a smile, peers up at Sherlock (and they're very close, but it's not anything more than closeness, and John likes this more). "Thanks for not killing yourself," he murmurs, and it sounds stupid, but he has to leave it, now.

Sherlock smirks, leaves a long pause, and falls back into close solemnity. "Thank you. For coming."

They go their separate ways, and John settles into a bed that isn't his, throws the duvet over his head, and falls easily into sleep for the first time since France. He doesn't have his nightmares, only smoky recollections of running through the streets of London to a swift jazz beat.

* * *

John stirs awake from half-remembered, swiftly-retreating thoughts of a hazy club, to the sound of the violin. Still bleary from sleep, John stretches, wonders what sort of time this is to be playing the violin (the pocket watch he's left on the bedside table says some time past four in the morning, which means he can't have been asleep for more than an hour and a half. He sighs, vaguely recalling something Sherlock had said about playing at all hours. That doesn't stop John from kicking the covers away and getting out of bed to check on him.

Sherlock is in the sitting room, right in front of the window that looks down onto the street outside, down to his dressing gown and pyjamas, and he's playing. Violin tucked softly under his chin, head tilted and then he sways with the movement of the bow. It's slow and syncopated, hitching on the eighth notes. Quiet nighttime jazz.

John leans heavily in the doorway and he watches.

Sherlock's eyes are closed, half-turned away from the window so John can see him in profile. When Sherlock hits those high, sad notes, he smiles, grins wide, and it all drops away when he leans back, takes the run of notes fast and fluid. John's heart in his ears is all the backing he needs, low thump of a beat. Sherlock's hips sway, shoulders bend, fingers race each other up the neck of the violin, and it _sings_.

It's just jazz he shouldn't be so excited, but it's _Sherlock_ and jazz, and he's making that instrument cry like a woman. And it's the right sort of mesmerizing, the kind he has to reach out and touch.

"Christ," John mutters, really can't help himself.

Sherlock looks up, the bow skittering off the strings in surprise.

Before he can even think, John cuts in: "Don't stop."

And after only the briefest pause (not even a smug smirk flickering to Sherlock's lips, just eyes locking), he starts to play again. Even slower, somehow it's possible. But the notes are just as strong and vibrant and they're practically shining in the air and Sherlock is _looking _at him. Eyes locked over the varnish of the violin, over the humming strings. And John is looking right back.

John approaches slowly, dragging his eyes over Sherlock's fingers on the neck, the bow, up long arms and down the open V of his dressing gown. And Sherlock knows well enough to remove the bow in time to allow John access, and he takes it. Stepping right in, and Sherlock just has enough time to yank the violin from under his chin before John is pressed up against him and they're kissing again.

This one is so different. The press of lips is more urgent, and Sherlock bows slightly and tilts his head and suddenly his tongue is in John's mouth. John doesn't argue. Sherlock's wrist, wrapped around the neck of the violin, digs into John's back, and the instrument thumps against him. So John's fingers dig into Sherlock's dressing gown and he yanks them even closer together.

And then Sherlock mutters a protesting: "_John._"

"What?" John asks, pulling back and slightly frustrated.

Sherlock grins languidly. "Let me put down my violin so I can touch you properly."

John fixes his hanging jaw. "Oh. All right."

He gives Sherlock the room necessary to step back and place the violin and bow down in his armchair by the fireplace. There's a bare moment when they manage to lock eyes again, and there's not even a sliver of doubt there. Sherlock steps in again, fixes his mouth on John's, and it's just as effortlessly that he lifts John and shoves him back onto his cluttered desk (pencils and newspaper clippings tumbling to the ground in his wake). John's sure he likes this angle even better.

(Especially the way Sherlock can stand between his legs, grab John by the thighs, the lower back, hitching them together to a drum beat of two hearts and scattered breath the brush over the cymbal. And Sherlock hums into John's open mouth when John wraps a knee around Sherlock's hip and pulls him closer, and it's just the sort of noise Sherlock can pull from his violin.)

Sherlock breaks back, fixes John with a stare that even he can read.

"Yours?" John breathes.

"Mrs. Hudson," Sherlock warns. "Old walls, bit dangerous."

John doesn't bring up that _dangerous_ is precisely what brought them together. "Mine. Needs to be broken in, anyhow."

Sherlock rolls his eyes. "As does your sense of humor."

John stops Sherlock's mouth with his own.

* * *

It's hardly light, but the city is awake long before someone comes knocking on their door. Sherlock rolls over, shoves John out of the bed first with one of his feet, and the soldier can only grumble in acquiescence. He grabs enough clothing to be respectable and inconspicuous, cinching a dressing gown over all of it.

There's a pretty young blonde woman at the door, and she looks sad and lost. "I'm sorry to bother you so early, Mister Holmes," she says quickly, clutching her purse, "but someone told me this is where I could come for help."

It takes John's sleepy brain a moment, then he laughs. "Sorry, no, I'm not Holmes." At first she looks embarrassed and crestfallen, but John cuts back in. "I'm his doctor. I can get him up, if you'd like. What sort of trouble is it?"

"It's my father," she says with a long, miserable pout. "He's missing."

John is about to tell her that it seems like the sort of thing the police would look into, when Sherlock's voice is suddenly in his ear.

"For how long?" Sherlock asks the girl.

She must make the connection—this one is Sherlock Holmes, the one and only consulting detective—and she answers dutifully. "Ten years."

A smile curls slow like smoke across Sherlock's lips. "Won't you come in?"

* * *

AN: And so ends A Study in Blue! It's been one heck of a trip and I've learned a lot-learned what to do for NEXT TIME! Because there WILL be more Jazzverse (you all thought you were off the hook HAH). I had been asked if I'd write anything decidedly smutty for this, but I couldn't bring myself to (I have never published smut before, so it'd be awful anyway~). I'm really glad to have had you all with me for this journey, and I hope you decide to stick around for whenever I pick up the baton again and direct my band of jazzporn. Thanks so much for reading and sticking with me, leave us some love, and most important of all, STAY AWESOME!


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